Multi-tasking has become the gold standard for the unconfident to demonstrate productivity ever since men started answering their own office telephones.

Tasks, past-times, and relationships have been hammered into paper-thin metal sheets slotted into the human mind like circuitry in a tall-stack server farm. We believe an overrun, thought-soaked marshland is the best possible brain, one action flooding over into another, finding its way to the sea.

Many actively fear focusing on a single task in life, at work, or with other people.

Why? Because long sentences make great scapegoats.

What does that mean? Let's dig deeper.

True self-believe, without exaggeration or deprecation, buoyed by total sincerity, is a gigantic challenge. General audiences observe self-promotion as perhaps the greatest vanity.

Just ask Kanye.

But self-belief is often all one has. It doesn't matter if you're working for yourself, or working at a big company, hitting the road and hawking your ideas to anyone who might listen is traditionally an intrusive act.

Artistry becomes selling, becomes marketing, becomes leadership, and taste-making.

And self-promotion is still a staggering undetaking of total exposure and vulnerability.

Independent passion projects require an incentive for your audience to return and return again. The internet affords people the ability to make their work visible to an entire planet. How can you channel that potential audience into a devoted fanbase though?

Whether you're a YouTuber, an artist on Etsy, a musician on Soundcloud, or a writer self-publishing your first novel, you can maintain a loyal following with samples of your work that they can share and you can be proud of.

Digital meets paper.

Here's how free books work as a downloadable...

Just like when Napster won the hearts of millions of music fans, and enraged Metallica's lawyers, you'll be happy to hear we're in a new age of digital content creation and consumption. The arrival of the .mp3 necessitated the CD burner, letting you load your digital music onto a format, you know, you can actually play.

Today, you have the opportunity to learn about getting the book file downloads you have onto your Kindle, iPhone, or Google Play Books app.

It's great for reading independent writing, content submissions, or even digital comic giveaways.

It's time for our Friday update! First the good news: progress is abundant on Diffused States' second chapter. In fact, there's too much material. At halfway, it's tracking to be twice as long as it should be.

This means, the word count will reach upward of 15,000. Taking the average reader's speed into account, 15,000 words takes about 70 minutes to read.

That's too long. It should be down more around 9000-10,000 words. The chapters on Ghost Little, of course, are divided into smaller sub-divisions while maintaining a story through-line.

The chapter will eventually be completed. Then some edits will need to happen to Diffused States first chapter—currently available for download like the rest of the free books on its downloads page—to assure continuity.

Today, you'll get a little insight into how the free book samples themselves. With The Scarlet Tenant the most recent publication, let's use it as our guinea pig.

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.

I remember when the internet and virtual reality became the new escapism for the non-conforming youth. Perhaps realer than the high-fantasy elves and goblins of generations prior because it was something the 90's rejects could actively live in. They could get away from the traditionalism that beat them down under pretense they defied.

So online, these rejects could share among one another. The sharper ones even had some measure of penetrating power online. And they had extra-special, secret names they gave themselves.

They could be anonymous, if they felt it. I get that freedom. It's a shield. They could vanish backward into anonymity, again, if they felt it.

Trouble is: that anonymity, that protectedness, that outcast mentality, it's burnt deep into the internet's bread and butter now. While once, it was a shield, now it's acid. The anonymity homogenizes and wounds online writing.

I hate advertising. My dad sold ad space in bicycle and skiing magazines. Technically, that's sales. He was selling companies real estate for them to hawk their reductive ideas of their products.

I don't hate my dad. I fact, I admire him. His work made me familiar with advertising at a young age. People, or companies, have a product that they want people to purchase. That product requires recognition. Ideally, you'd want a certain person to recognize that product, considering that certain person would be more inclined to purchase the product, rather than the billions of other humans on the planet.

Recognition is a fantastic sales tool. Recognition is the best salesperson imaginable.

It hasn't happened yet, but the salesperson is evolving. They'll be difficult to recognize alongside their contemporary form.

How is a salesperson evolving? Someday, they'll be singular individuals with good tastes on a certain topic that may just HAPPEN to work for a certain company. They'll sell solutions to a buyer's query, like a living search-engine. This is a fantasy, of course. The salesperson will always be at least somewhat compromised by their employment.

This is not the case with a good marketer.