#Writing Wednesday - August 30th 2017

My pirate themed adventure story is glaring at me with such intensity that I can see the accusation in the stare even without sight. Mind you, just the fact something without physical substance, let alone eyes, is able to glare is impressive in itself. Regardless, I see the accusation in the stare, and hear the claims of neglect. I’m trying to offer it reassurances that it’s not being neglected, and it will get the attention it deserves soon. I don’t think I’m doing a very good job of convincing it though, since I’ve done very little with it over the past couple of months.

What I have done though is to get the various guest posts, character interviews, and other promotional posts - including those for my own blog - for the blog tours I'm doing for promotion of each of my five series, as close to being ready to go live as I can without the purchase links for the audio editions of the books. I also need some stuff from the narrators to go in most of them, but my part of writing them is done. All I need to work on now is a couple of character interviews that are being done slightly differently so require me to wait for someone else, and gathering the audiobook purchase links as they become available so I can add them to the posts. Oh, and there's getting the stuff from the rest of the narrators and adding those to the posts too.

I've also been working on the production notes ready for doing the audio editions of the rest of my backlist of books, including my poetry books, and gathering all the eBook and paperback purchase links together for them all (since I plan to include those in the posts, along with the audiobook links, as I'm doing with the posts for the series books). All of the audiobook production notes are ready now; I finished sorting those out over the weekend. So I'll be able to start setting them up for production when I'm ready to. I'm obviously not about to set them all up at once, but I wanted the notes and lists of links ready now so there's a little less work to do when I'm setting them up. While I wait to set those projects up, I can think about how I'm going to approach promotion for those titles without making people sick of hearing my name. I'm considering just doing basic announcements on my own blog for those, so as to not take advantage of those people helping with promotion so much that everyone gets sick of me. Maybe I'll just post for each on my blog, and then do some kind of post to say all my stuff is now in audio afterwards? Mind you, maybe people will get the hint that I'm making my backlist available in audio with the five sets of posts already going up? Anyone out there have any thoughts on the matter? Input would be very much appreciated.

Either way, now those tasks are all done, it frees up a bit more time for me to give that story the attention it's demanding. I can work on it while waiting for audio samples to listen to, audiobook links becoming available, etc. I think my plan of having it completely ready to be published before the end of the year isn't going to happen though. I mean, I could get it done, but I feel like it's a long way from being finished, and I don't want to rush it. Maybe that's a good thing though, since it gives me time to catch up on audiobook production before having a brand new book to announce. Actually, I might hold off on publishing it until next year even if it is ready before then, just so I can focus on promoting the old titles as they become available as audiobooks. Besides, it would probably get lost among the announcements of audio versions of older titles otherwise.

Anyway, if you're a writer too - and regardless of what stage your own writing is at - here's a great article on how to survive and thrive in the writer's discomfort zone.

Finally, check out this excellent post on how to write a book.