Year: 2015

Prioritizing an income producing series

Lynn

It’s come to my attention after a bit of back of the napkin math this evening that I’ve been giving lip service to the idea of prioritizing my income producing series while I’ve been avoiding just that thing.

That back of the napkin math has shown me the error of my ways.

If I focus on writing only my income producing series instead of trying to fit in all the other series I have going (I have five!), I can earn more money with 1/3 of the writing in the next five months. Basically, I can earn more money with 3 new books than I can earn with 6, because of how significant the difference in earnings is between the books in the various series and because I would have fewer books released in my income producing series. (I realize this looks like I did my math wrong, but it has to do with the length of the books and how much I still need to write for each one. In the one scenario, it’s 80,000 words a month, in the other it’s 25,000–30,000 words a month. There were also some other books in there that I love writing but that just don’t earn.)

It was an eye opener for sure.

I have a lot of resistance to the notion of putting all my writing effort toward my one series, but I’ve come up with a mental shift that I think will make it work for me.

  • I’ll have deadlines for the books in the income producing series, but I won’t have deadlines for the other books.
  • I’ll always work on the books in the income producing series first every day, with an eye toward keeping myself on track to finish by my deadline (one book every two months).
  • If I am on track or ahead of pace, then I can devote leftover scheduled writing time to working on whatever book I want in those other series.
  • I’m going to start taking one to two days a week off the writing schedule, based on how I’m staying on pace to finish my latest book in my income producing series.
  • I won’t take off more days than that on a regular basis, even if I am getting ahead on those books. The extra writing time can go toward those books that don’t have deadlines.

The reason I’ve had misgivings about this in the past and the reason I continue to feel weird about it is that the only real way to know if I could earn more money with the books in the other series is if I could put out the books considerably faster than I’ve been putting them out. I would have to put off writing the books in the income producing series so I can devote more time to writing all these other books, but the risk associated with that is just too great. I kind of like having enough money to pay my bills. :D

If I continue to make progress on sticking to my schedule, I should be writing more than enough words to meet my deadlines for the income producing books and get some of the other books written and start having a few days a week off if that’s what I want. (Today was a rest day because I haven’t been feeling well since yesterday, so no guilt for not writing.)

Writing: July 19, 2015, Sunday

Lynn

There’s no entry for yesterday, not that I wasn’t planning to write. But events conspired against it, and I had family issues to deal with. I won’t bore you with the details.

Never mind, maybe I will. My father and son were run off the road by an SUV, driven by someone who didn’t stop after causing the accident. I’ve always said it was other people you have to watch out for when you’re driving because half the people on the road are idiots who shouldn’t be behind the wheel. Yes, they are! Anyway, my family is fine, but I have frustration to work out in my writing and a story to finish today. :D

I’m ready to make up for some lost time with today’s writing. My ultimate goal, and yes, I’ve given in and started calling them goals again, because I just can’t keep doing the mental gymnastics to call it something else, is to have a daily average of about 3,000 words using my schedule. It’s taking me a while to learn how to get there, but I do believe I can.

10:06 am

I’m getting started with today’s writing now. I’ll update some word counts and progress at my breaks.

12:17 pm

I’ve written 521 words this morning. That’s … incredibly slow for 2 hours of writing. :( I can legitimately blame some of that slowness on plotting, but the truth is, the plot is there and I was just tweaking stuff in one particular scene opening to make it easy to follow. I paid for that with a really low word count. I can definitely improve that when I get back to work, but it’s break time. I think I’m going to go ahead and take it now.

9:54 pm

I wrote 1,957 words today, but I deleted 461 words that I thought I’d be able to keep of the last scene in the book that I wrote at about the halfway point through the story. I have to be up really early tomorrow and it won’t be a writing day for a change, but I’m still trying to finish this story before I go to bed. However, I probably won’t take the time to write a final entry for this post until tomorrow or Tuesday. I need as much sleep as I can get tonight!

I wanted more words, and even though I’ll probably get some, I honestly believe I’m only a few paragraphs from wrapping this one up. 3,000 will have to wait until Tuesday. See you then.

Writing: July 17, 2015, Friday

Lynn

9:14 am

I’m a little late getting started, slept badly, went to sleep late even after trying not to, and breakfast took about 35 minutes.

I want to finish my short story today, start the next, and get some words done on my novels. Getting started as soon I can get myself into the short story. I’ll be shutting off WIFI.

11:46 am

I seem to be writing much more slowly today than yesterday. I’m am getting closer to the end finally. I did succeed in fitting in a section I thought I might have to delete. Now I just need a certain scene changed up a bit, and the final scene. I think that will wrap it up, a couple thousand words longer than I meant it to be, but I’ll be done, so yay! Again today I’m not ready for my break yet, so I think I’ll write until 1 instead of 12.

12:37 pm

Somehow I’ve wasted 50 minutes of writing time, not even sure how. I think it was because I slipped a look at my Kindle when I took a quick break. Big mistake during writing time. I have a plan to read in the mornings from 7 to 9, but I should think about coming up with a way to leave my Kindle upstairs until after 4. If I don’t have my Kindle down here, I just read on my phone instead though so there doesn’t seem to be a lot of point to that. Maybe I should try the no forums/blogs/reports until 4 again. It just felt so … uncomfortable. But weak willpower will happen again, even though I feel right now like I could just stick to not visiting those sites during writing time. Okay, anyway, back to work. I want to write 3000 words today and have a normal lunch at 1 pm and watch an episode of NCIS or something while I do it.

12:55 pm

Forget it. I’m stopping for lunch now. I’m just too tired. I need a rest and a mental readjustment before I get started again. Besides, my laptop needs to charge.

1:16 pm

Okay, never mind that. I wrote a bit more and the scene issues are being worked out. Going to lunch now and will be back to work by 2:16 sharp.

5:43 pm

I didn’t restart at 2:16. I felt like I needed a nap and the computer wasn’t charged yet so I took one. Then I did that post on this site about the new pen name. Then my daughter came home and I spent time talking to her.

Since I do want to reach 3000 again, I’m going to put in some extra writing time so I can. I’m only at 888 for the day and I’m really not satisfied with that.

Now I’m getting back to work. I can break through to a new level of daily word counts if I just keep trying and today’s 3000 word goal is part of that effort.

11:06 pm

I really just seemed to run out of time this evening with obligations of one kind and another. I wrote 1,459 words total, but I also deleted 651, so I ended up with only 808 on my daily log, which is significantly short of where I wanted to end up. The 1,459 was half way there, though, and the 651 I deleted was a scene meant for late in the story that I wrote very early on, and it just didn’t work with the story as it developed and approached the end. Tomorrow I will finish this story and move on to the next.

I’d like to be asleep by 11:30 so I can be fresh for tomorrow’s writing, so I’m calling it done. I’m feeling a bit dissatisfied with the day I had today, but all I can do is try harder tomorrow not to let it happen again.

How I’m building my new pen name: Two weeks in

Lynn

Here I’m going to lay out my plan for building my second pen name without doing any kind of active promotion. Active promotion generally means most of the kinds of promotional activities you’ve heard of.

This post is the first I’m going to do for the new pen name. It’s part of my plan to build an empire, so that’s where these posts will go. (Yay! I’ve finally figured out something to put in that category.)

The truth is, I feel like a beginner still, but I’ve been publishing my books since July 2012, three years now. I’ve been a writer since I was a young teenager—a very young teenager. Maybe it’s impostor syndrome or just that I know there’s so much I don’t know (that I might never know) about this business, but it’s hard for me to talk to other writers without feeling like the one standing on the outside of success and looking in.

This post is an exercise in getting past all that.

I’ve learned a few things in the last three years and accomplished a lot, and I think I can make a success out of this new pen name even though it’s getting off to a slow start.

So here goes. I’m not planning to give away my new pen name for this experiment. Seriously. If you figure it out, please do not tell me you’ve figured it out. If I didn’t want to be anonymous, I would have chosen to reveal my pen name(s) right from the get go. I would never out you and I would appreciate it if you didn’t out me. ;)

Thank you in advance for being understanding about that! :D

I first published the new book a few days into July. I published at $3.99 because I had heard from a lot of other authors that that was the best price at the moment, and because experimenting with different prices was the entire reason I wanted to do a new pen name. I looked into the market and saw that this was a popular price point in the genre the new book fits into. I’m not used to pricing this low. It felt really weird.

I sold 8 copies at 3.99 in 3 days, then 0 copies for 2 days. I posted the book on my author site, but since there’s never been any activity there because, hey, no books, I don’t consider my pen name to have any kind of a platform. No twitter, no facebook, no G+ profile. I plan to keep it that way for as long as possible. I have a website for the pen name and a mailing list that readers can sign up to. That’s it.

After the 2 days of no sales, I raised the price up to 6.99. I mean, if I’m not going to get lucky with an unexpected hit right off and sales are going to be slow until the second book is done, then I might as well, right? When I use the countdown deal before my 90 days in KDP Select is over, at least the discount will look better.

I sold 3 books at 6.99 in the next 3 days and then back to 0.

At about the one week mark, I put the book into KDP Select and moved on.

It’s a 328 page book as far as KENPC goes, and there’ve been 3006 pages read as of today.

So somebody’s reading it.

Now the wait is on until I get a second book written and published.

I’ll post first month results when they’re available, but the fact is, I don’t expect much. New pen name, no promo, high price, etc. There’s just no real chance that anything of note will happen until the next book comes out.

My goal is to put out the next book in the series for the new pen name within 90 days. I’d go for 60, but a lot of stuff is going to have to fall into place to make that happen, including me cracking through to a higher level of daily word count. I’m working on it, but I’m certainly not ready to count on it. :)

Writing: July 16, 2015, Thursday

Lynn

8:49 am

So. Yesterday. It didn’t go so well. I wrote just over 300 words. Breakfast is at the table waiting on me so I can finish it quickly and get started on time this morning (the writing schedule is 9–12 & 1–4). I’m planning to ignore yesterday’s failure and just get back to it today. :)

Last night I revisited those book covers I was practicing on. I like them. I am going to decide today whether or not to use them or hold off for something different when I have time to practice more cover making skills.

So, I’m turning the WIFI off (as soon as these windows updates complete) and I won’t be turning it back on until after 4 on the computer. I’ll update this post through my Kindle or phone at select intervals, because I’d like to see some real progress on that short story and on my word count today. :) I’d also like to rebuild my tags in a way that makes sense later today. Maybe I won’t forget!

2:57 pm

I’m just restarting after lunch but I’m at 1,750 words for the day. I only have an hour before 4 and I want to reach at least 3000 today. I’m not sure I’ll make it, but I think I’ll keep going if I don’t.

4 pm

I haven’t reached 3,000 words yet, but I’m really close. I’m at 2,739 for the day. I wrote very close to 1000 words in that last hour of writing, and I’m a lot further along on my short story because that’s the only story I’ve worked on today (actually it’s a novelette now). I don’t feel like I’m all that much closer to the end, but maybe I am. I’m going to continue on after a short (really short) break. I still want to finish that story today.

Also, I’m going to tweak the titles of these posts.

6:24 pm

I’m calling it a night on the writing. I reached 3,333 words and I thought that was a fun place to stop. I’m also very happy that I reached my 3,000 word goal today and I came up with a new tag for these kinds of posts. Well done, self. :)

I enjoy writing these kinds of posts. They seem to help me stay centered in what I’m doing. Sometimes. I admit it doesn’t work all the time.

All in all, I’m happy with how my day turned out.

Writing: July 15, Wednesday (2015)

Lynn

I’m writing this on my phone, because if I go on my computer I will get sucked in and end up wasting my writing time. The voice recognition on my phone doesn’t like my accent that well. I’ll correct any major issues later because my phone does not make editing easy.

It’s 11 o’clock and I just lost about an hour of time trying to get one of the Lightning Deals on Amazon but the site was having trouble.

Anyway, no more of that crap. ;) I have lots of writing to do!

I got started at 9 o’clock this morning. I put in edits, & I ended up with 110 words. Then instead of getting started writing on that particular story I went ahead and moved to another story and put edits in on it. I ended up with seven additional words, lol.

Now it’s time to go back to the first story and work on it. I’m trying to finish it today because it’s a short story so that I can move on to something else.

I stayed up quite late last night trying to fix myself a production schedule and do some thinking about what I planned. That means I’m short of sleep, and that has a tendency to make me unfocused.

I’m going to be fighting that all day, but I think it’s worth it because I did come to some nice realizations last night, and I did get a nice production schedule laid out.

12 PM: 316 words

I was just starting to get into new material when the alarm for my hour break went off.

3:06 PM: No progress

I’m not doing well sticking to the writing today. I’m feeling all messed up and hung out to dry and maybe it’s lack of sleep, but I have a hunch it’s related to visiting a certain forum too often lately. Ugh. I’ve got to learn to let this stuff go! Anxiety makes it so hard for me to write, and I have no idea why I get anxious reading forums anyway. It might be the conflict. Conflict makes me so nervous. I get a sick stomach. In fact, I have one now, because I posted! I shouldn’t have posted! I can’t really delete it now though.

Thank God I’m mostly anonymous, because you know what? Most writers are assholes. :D I’m probably one too. I have a high opinion of my work, and I pretty much always think my opinion is the most reasoned. I should ignore the fact that I wrote something there and get back to writing my books. I really wanted to write so many words today.

Oh, oh, oh. I should pull up my hosts file and block the site. That’s about the best way I know of to take care of that kind of thing. The only problem is that when I do that I’ve usually just posted something and I end up unblocking it so I can respond. Nope. I need to make a rule and then let it go.

New rule: I can only visit that forum (and the TPV blog, because I waste a lot of time there!) between 8–9 PM and only if I don’t have something I’d be better off doing. If I’m tired and have already called it a night, sure. If I just want to procrastinate on doing something I have the energy to do and should really be doing, then no visit. :D

Is that rule too complicated to be successful?

Nah. I can make it work.

I need to start a series of posts that keep me accountable for all these little rules I have. And my schedule. And other stuff. What’s a blog for anyway? Well, this one’s an exercise in egotism, mostly. ;)

And holy crap. Look at the time. It’s 3:52 and all I’ve accomplished here is a long ramble about my anxiety issues. :o Back to work!

Writing: July 14, Tuesday (2015)

Lynn

4 PM – End of scheduled writing
I’ve only written 322 words. That accounts for some minor edits and deletions, but mostly I just didn’t get started on time and then I couldn’t stay focused. I start after 11 AM, stopped at 12 for a break (when I would have normally taken lunch), restarted before 1 PM, stopped just before 4.

 

I deleted all my tags

Lynn

I wanted to do a clean up on them and it was taking too long. I admit I’m supposed to be writing right now, and deleting them seemed the quickest way to accomplish my goal of getting myself back to work. :) No tags = nothing to clean up!

I’ll probably bring some of them back later, when I can do it without wasting good writing time, because they do make it a bit easier to find related posts. :)

Writing on a schedule (Restart—day 4)

Lynn

Today I wrote 1,709 words in about 3.5 hours (one story). I have 4 novels and 1 short story I’m trying to finish as soon as I can. 4 for one pen name, 1 for another. I really wish I could write faster. I want to get all the ideas down for these stories while they’re fresh in my mind and my slow speed makes it so hard to do.

The bad news is that I really didn’t do anything any different today, so it’s not reasonable for me to expect to have made any improvements in my speed. I’m going to try to think of some ways to change that for tomorrow.

I could—

  • use a timer (I really don’t want to!)
  • spend a few minutes writing a short line or two about where I think each of my stories should/could go next (I need to remember to try this tomorrow)
  • find some way to keep reminding myself to write new words instead of playing with what’s already there (I really have been overdoing this)
  • I don’t know, but I’m sure there’s something else I could do! I’m going to give it more thought tonight.

I want to have 2 of these stories done by the end of August because I have a public “tentative” deadline for those two. Meaning of course I can change the date, but I’d really rather not. :o

I tried to stay on schedule both days, but the truth is I’m having a lot of trouble getting started on time in the morning and after lunch. If I weren’t having so much trouble, I’d be much closer to 3000 words a day.

I’m just going to keep trying.

If I ever crack this speed thing, I’d love to be writing closer to 3000 words a day in about 3 to 4 hours and I’d write from 9 to 1 every day instead of having to have 2 sessions (9 to 12 and 1 to 4) to even get close. I think I’d love it anyway. Won’t know for sure until I get there. ;)

Time for some honestly here. I would write much slower if my income didn’t depend on it because although writing is fun for me, I don’t feel compelled to do it all that often and the work to get it down into text is not my favorite thing in the world. I love having written and rereading my stories much more than I love the actual writing of them. :)

The good news is that I’m doing it anyway, and I’m really happy that I’ve been able to make this my career. I don’t think I’d enjoy any other half as much.

Fri, 7/10/15 746,353 2,321
Sat, 7/11/15 747,726 1,373
Sun, 7/12/15 749,681 1,955
Mon, 7/13/15 751,390 1,709

Writing on a schedule (Restart—day 3)

Lynn

Yesterday I wrote 1,955 words (working on two stories). I meant to make that 2,000 before I went to bed, but television distracted me. I ended up watching a movie.

The fact is, although I would have liked to have written 2,000, I did stick to the schedule and stopped at 4 pm. I should have just kept going for a few more minutes and wrote the next 45 words before I stopped, because I don’t have an obligation to write anything after 4 and I should have suspected I might not get back to it. :) Lesson learned. Maybe I’ll remember it next time.

Fri, 7/10/15 746,353 2,321
Sat, 7/11/15 747,726 1,373
Sun, 7/12/15 749,681 1,955

Increasing my daily word count average

Lynn

It’s time I started to focus on increasing my daily word count average. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, something I’ve been writing about here, off and on, for more than a year. (That link goes to all the posts I tagged with the relevant tag. They started back in April 2014.)

Two things I’ll need to do to increase my daily word count average—

  1. increase my writing speed
  2. improve my ability to write for longer periods of time without tiring out or succumbing to boredom or distraction

Despite the popular notion that all it takes to write faster is to spend more time writing, those are two distinctly different things as far as I’m concerned. There’s writing more and there’s writing faster. Writing faster means increasing my speed, and my writing speed is how many words I write during a specific unit of time. Increasing the amount of time I spend writing doesn’t change my speed.

I’ve realized over the last few months that even though I say I’ve given up on the idea of writing faster in favor of writing more, that’s not exactly true. I do want to write faster, because there are just so many stories I want to write, and I want to have written them already! It’s unfortunate that I can’t go back in time and make that happen. ;) The next best thing is to get them written as fast as I can.

As for improving my ability to write for longer periods of time without tiring out or succumbing to boredom or distraction, I’m still working on it. Right now, with the success I’m having with the schedule, I’m definitely writing more on the days when I stick to it. So to accomplish item #2 on the list, I’ll just keep pushing myself to stick as close to my schedule as possible. Six hours of writing each day is enough. Anything over five hours of actual writing is going to make me happy.

That leaves me with trying to figure out how I can increase my writing speed. For the next few weeks at least, I’m going to be recording my efforts to do just that.

I wrote 2,321 words of fiction today

Lynn

I stuck to the schedule today! Yay! I’m quite excited. I feel like I’m settling in again. I wrote 2,321 words today, and that was split almost evenly between two books. When I was writing, I felt like I was doing well with letting things flow.

Now, off to read a bit before bed, and then tomorrow I try going back to 9–12 & 1–4 for the next 7 days. Wish me luck sticking to the schedule. :)

Wednesday restart could’ve been better

Lynn

My routine is all messed up and I’ve been having a lot of trouble trying to get my writing schedule restarted. Today I finally had a little success at that. Admittedly, I’ve had a few days where I thought I was getting back on track only to have it all fall apart the next day. I’m not going to let that happen tomorrow.

Tomorrow I begin a new streak with my schedule, a new beginning, if you will. Today was day one and one day doesn’t make a streak. ;)

I decided this morning that 10 am is a better start time for me right now. I just can’t seem to get going before 8 am and that doesn’t leave enough time for me to start on time every day at 9. So no more 9–1. The rest of the summer the schedule is 10–4.

I went back to 6 hours because I have so much to write this month and next and I think I can make it work. I’m hoping not having a break in there won’t be a big deal. We’ll see tomorrow. :) Now, off to write for a while before calling it a night.

Not so fast

Lynn

I had planned to get started writing again today, but I stayed up way too late again last night working on a cover for a second book in my new pen name series. I just wanted to get a feel for how easy or hard it’s going to be to create them. This one has taken a LOT longer to come together for me, but I finally came up with a title that interested me and have gotten a look I like. I’ve spent most of the day so far on that.

Yes, I regret not writing! And not sticking to my schedule! I blame it on weak impulse control caused by lack of sleep. ;)

I AM going to get this out of the way today and do some writing this evening, even if I have to do it half asleep. :)

However, I’ve been thinking of the benefits of putting up the cover on my new pen name’s website and I’ve just about decided it’s worth finishing so I can do that.

Also, I say with feeling that although I understand the concept of ROI, my brain isn’t cooperating with me today. This cover’s never going to be perfect and it’s probably as good as it’s going to get, and yet… I am still at it. Maybe I should give that some thought before I let myself make just one more tweak. ;)

On to the next book

Lynn

Okay, I stayed up until 4 am getting that publishing stuff done. But it’s done. :)

I really wish I’d been able to sleep later than 7:30 this morning, because yeah, that’s some serious sleep deficit there. I feel it. Surprisingly I’m not sleepy, but I am very tired. Thinking about taking a cool bath and falling asleep in the tub tonight. ;)

Tomorrow I won’t have any excuse to fail when it comes to my schedule, so my number one priority tonight is not to stay up too late!

Too much pressure and it’s all self-imposed

Lynn

I am so ridiculously worked over about this new pen name novel. In all likelihood it won’t sell a thing. I mean, first book, new pen name, blah blah blah. And yet, I still have this horrible sinking feeling that I’m not ready to put this one out there. I’ve given this book entirely too much importance in my life and this is me saying, “Fuck that.” ;) I can’t work under that kind of pressure! :D I need relief!

Anyway, I did finish the copy edit. I didn’t write yesterday because I decided to do something stupid that turned out to be pretty awesome. I made my own cover for the pen name book even though I had a perfectly nice cover that I bought from a designer several months ago.

I had a couple of reasons for doing that.

  • I decided I absolutely do want a print edition sooner rather than later, but I bought a cover only for an ebook and I’d have to pay to get the cover made print compatible.
  • After living with the original cover for a while, I realized a few things about it that I’d rather I’d had done differently, but I didn’t want to hassle anyone to make changes and I definitely didn’t want to pay for them, especially considering how I’ve been feeling about this book.

The interesting thing is that as usual, the cover took me about 5-6 hours until I had a look I was happy with, then another 1-3 hours to replace the comp photo with the purchased photo and get the sizing and layer mask correct. But I now have a great layout and template for future books in that series. Since I hope the book sells better than I expect it to, I’ve thought it through enough to know I want to write a lot more books in the series, maybe as many as 20. Yep. That’s 20 whole books. Which would be a lot of covers and a lot of dollars, and a LOT of extra dollars for print covers, if I had stayed with the designer of the original cover.

I also feel like it’s a better cover than I had before, and yeah, I had to get a second and third opinion on that because I was really worried I was just imagining that the cover was better. But my name is more prominent (not bigger, just a lot easier to read!) and the book now looks like it can easily be part of a series. I’m tempted to create a second cover for the potential second book just to see if I’m right about that.

I wonder if I need to let the designer know I decided to go with a different cover? If you know the answer to that question, please let me know! I am terrible at knowing how to handle stuff like this.

I really like my new cover though. I still kind of wish I’d gotten at least some writing done yesterday. My excuse for today is that I’ve been planning to publish this book all day. Hasn’t quite worked out like that. :) I did spend about 4 hours writing and rewriting the description for the book. I’m still not sure it hits all the right notes.

Now here I am, trying to get the formatting done, and it’s 8:11 pm and I’m still stalling. I know it’s because of how I feel about this book. I just can’t let go of this feeling that I’m not ready to put it up. I have to get back to my other books though and they won’t wait. So, I need to get this book published before I go to bed tonight.

If I do just stick it in KDP Select like I was thinking I’d do, this shouldn’t take too long. Not nearly as long as usual. :) I mean, wow. All I have to do is finish setting the doc up in Word, import to Jutoh, and a few minutes later, I’ll have a mobi to check in the Kindle Previewer. I could have this book published by 10 pm if I just get to work…

And that’s my cue to get busy.

What I did today

Lynn

I wrote about 2,419 words. My effort to just let it all come out and fly wasn’t really successful. I mean, I wrote from 9–1 and after accounting for breaks and interruptions (I had a big one), I probably got in about 3 solid hours of writing, maybe 3.5. So about 700–800 words an hour. This was split between two books. I wrote somewhere around 1,400 words on one story and then switched to another for the last 1,000. Neither of these books are one of the two I had planned to choose between as my next book.

I finished the read through of Book A (new book for the new pen name). Now I need to make the last few corrections I noted and get started with that formatting. :) Wish me luck!

 

I’ll never feel like doing it so I might as well get it done

Lynn

If you can’t tell from the title of this post, I just rewatched one of my favorite inspirational YouTube videos.

It’s made me realized I’m not getting anywhere by waiting on myself to feel like finishing the copy edit on that book. Not just the copy edit either. I keep waiting on myself to feel like formatting it, writing the description, and getting it published. I feel no particular urgency to get those things done. I’m still riding the coattails of my last release and that makes it easy to just wait until I feel like getting it done.

Big mistake in the long run, and I do recognize that. If I wait until I need it published then the book’s success or failure becomes so much more important than it is right now. It’s a new pen name after all and I have no idea how it will do. Having one in the wings is great, but having two or three is better. :)

So, tonight I finish reading the book. With only 25% of the book to go, my Kindle believes it will take me 1 hour 5 minutes to finish. If I double that because I read super slowly when I’m doing this kind of read through, that’s still just two hours.

I need about an hour to revisit my description and ten minutes or so to pick keywords. As for formatting, I can have my Word file ready in a half hour of solid work, and an EPUB less than five minutes later. If the EPUB validates, I’ll generate a MOBI, which will only take a few seconds in Jutoh.

I’ll be saving that work for tomorrow after my writing time ends at 1 pm.

Since I’ve decided to try out KDP Select with this book, that’s the sum total of the work I’ll need to do at the moment.

So, this means I should expect myself to have this book published by tomorrow night.

Later, I’ll do a paperback (probably the middle of July) if the book is selling a reasonable number of copies. If it’s selling poorly, I’ll make a new cover for the book and replace the professionally designed cover I purchased. The reason I’ll change the cover is so that I can do a paperback edition at no added expense. If the book is selling well, I’ll hire the original cover designer to make a paperback cover for me.

I’ve been studying some stuff lately to help me make better covers and I’m tempted to try it out on this book either way, because if it does sell well, I’ll be turning this puppy into a series ASAP. :)

It never hurts to be optimistic—at least not until your dreams are crushed. Then it kinda hurts. ;)

If nothing else, my copy edit time today reminded me that the book doesn’t suck. I wish I’d had the guts to write another 30,000 words on it, instead of ending it so soon, but I really need to write my other books. Anything I want to expand on for these characters can be worked into the follow up books as side story. I love revisiting characters through the eyes of other characters. :D