Hello, friends. I’m your host, Crys Cain. And I’m recording this July 7th, 2020. So what have I done in the last week? Well, I published a romance book with my co-writer and it went sub-200 in the Amazon store, which is wonderful. We also put up our first preorder in surprisingly a year. We were at a point where we were doing preorders with every book, but then between health issues and family issues, we stopped, and I was shocked to see it was a full year.

I’m a huge fan of preorders. I like knowing exactly when things are going to go out. I’ve also had really good luck with them with rank in the Amazon store. The books that we’ve done in our popular series with preorder have gone below 100 in the Amazon store. And the books in the same world where we haven’t done preorders, haven’t gone that low. They’ve stayed maybe more in like the 200 or 300 range for a little bit longer. And that’s just an interesting piece of information. The sales are virtually the same every book and that is what really matters to me.

So this week I want to talk about Becca Syme’s Write Better-Faster 1.0 class, which I took in May. A lot of people are familiar with it. It’s become really popular in this last year, but if you’re not, it’s basically a class on personal productivity.

And what makes it different from reading a book on productivity, is that Becca is a Clifton strengths certified coach, and she uses that training and a combination of personality tests to help students pick apart their personal productivity makeup. She does personal coaching, but the Write Better-Faster course is a series of lessons that help you understand how the elements of the personality test results interact in different realms.

So you start by taking three different tests. And for my session, it was a form of Myers-Briggs, a form of the D.I.S.C (the DISC test) and the Clifton strengths profile. And then she starts digging into an overview of those results and what they mean generally, and then specific realms and topics that writers deal with and how their results influence that.

And what I’m going to do is I’m going to go into detail about my personal results and what I’ve learned about me and how I work. I find specific accounts of, these kinds of classes or experiences super interesting for one, but it also helps me decide when I’m trying to figure out if a class works just to hear how other people’s experiences went in detail.

Some of the topics that Becca goes over once you’ve got a general handle on your personality profile are goals, time management, energy management, your environment, story creation, the process of writing, editing, and habits. She starts the class out by asking the students to identify what their essential pain is. Like what’s the thing that either keeps them from writing or is making writing feel difficult or whatever is the thing that keeps bothering them.

And when I started the class, April had been my least stressful and most productive month in, I don’t know, a year, two years. And so I was just like, well, I’m just going to try and maximize my ability, but then May took a horrible, just downward turn emotionally. And I only wrote a third of what I’d written the previous month and I was kind of flailing, but I couldn’t pinpoint an essential pain, but we did get some really good things out of our one-on-one. But what I’m going to do now is go over the personality profiles and then the Clifton strengths.

And in between, I’ll talk about kind of the things I learned throughout the class and also in the one-on-one. So the first test was the D.