Happy Friday (and National Book Lovers Day) everyone!

Preface: Welcome to another weekly round-up post from our growing community of bloggers, writers, vloggers, podcasters, and other fellow creatives. To be straight to the point, each and every week we hand-pick five top posts from a pool of the highest voted user-submitted/created posts in the community and include them in this weekly round-up blog post, along with the newsletter for all of our e-mail subscribers. As per our submission rules, posts shared can not be re-posts, or older than 1 month (31 days), meaning that all of the following are fresh and recent! Tune in every week and you will gradually become a better and more insightful creative over time!

Douglas Preston from the L.A. Times captures our top spot this week with his investigative look into how writers are earning significantly less compared to just a decade ago because of various scams such as counterfeiting, doppelganging, title and sub-title cloning, piracy, plagiarism, among others. Little is being done about it at the moment, but it’s great to see this appear in a popular and nationally read newspaper, helping it garner it some well deserved attention.

In a close second, Darius Foroux lays out an incredibly simple but effective 4 step plan on how to form new habits that ultimately reflect your progress in life, and your creative journey. The pattern almost each and every time: Start small and work your way up.

Topping off the podium is Ann Marie Nieves from the Writer Unboxed blog, who focuses her post on small victories and how to embrace them, which coincidently is a bit of a continuation from Darius’ post just above. Great minds think alike! 😉

In our fourth spot Tim Denning, a popular Medium writer, self-reflects on the lessons he learned the hard (but common) way–by failing. Creating and launching a paid course is a growing and effective tactic in monetizing a blog or website, but as the space gets more congested, it will only get harder for those who dare step into the arena.

Last but not least, we arrive at The Art of Blogging, with Christian Mihai’s simple but effective list of things you can do to improve your blog and attract more readers. Some of these will take a significant amount of work, but that’s just how it works and sadly there’s no getting around it.

So without further ado, here are this week’s (Aug 3 – Aug 9, 2019) most valuable posts from the /t/BES creatives community:

? 1.  Op-Ed: Online Book-Selling Scams Steal a Living From Writers
“Counterfeiting, author “doppelganging,” title cloning, ebook piracy, cut-and-paste plagiarism and other rip-offs — many of which take place on digital platforms like Amazon, Ebay and Google. The variety and cleverness of these cons is breathtaking.”

? 2.  How to Form New Habits That Matter (Mirror)
“Habits change your life, but they do not guarantee success. That’s what “the habits of millionaires” type of articles and books tell us. We get it, Elon Musk sleeps two hours a day and eats Cheerios for dinner — or something like that.”

? 3.  Embracing Small Victories
“Begin paying very close attention to your physical and emotional reactions during your workday or any time you’re doing something for your career. Rethink the phrase, “Go big or go home.” Reflect on the phrase, “Success is a series of small victories.”

4. I Launched an Online Course and It Flopped (Mirror)
“I genuinely just wanted to teach a few people something that helped me, through the medium of an online course. The time required is a lot more than writing a blog post, so I was perfectly comfortable in charging for this service.”

5. 8 Best Ways To Gain Followers For Your Blog
“I know that one of the main reasons we blog is to be read by other people, so this makes it important to gain more followers, to receive feedback, to feel as if what you blog about truly matters to other people.”

That’s all folks! You can view all the rest of the community’s top submissions (11 more) here.

Be sure to tune in next Friday for another great weekend reading list that will make you a better and more informed blogger, writer, and/or content creator! If you have anything awesome to submit that others might enjoy, feel free to do so — it might even end up on next week’s top five!

And don’t forget to help others find this nifty resource by sharing it around! Huge thanks!

PS: Run a blog, vlog, or podcast, or any other creative endeavor? Start an accompanying homebase/community (like ours) on Snapzu (a social sharing platform for bloggers/creatives) and utilize it to help you dominate your social media game using the immense power of content CURATION, and effortlessly create and send out awesome routine round-up posts/newsletters like this to help grow your audience (and newsletter) 3x faster. It’s free! More info here.