Jeffe's Five Effective Work Habits for Writing Productivity

My series rebrand of the six-book epic romantic fantasy saga, Sorcerous Moons, is complete! Book One, LONEN'S WAR, releases Friday in Kindle Unlimited (KU), with each subsequent book releasing one/day for the following week. 

This is my first (and possibly last!) real test of whether my books can be successful in KU. I've run A/B tests before and I've always made 2-3x as much money in sales on Amazon alone than via page reads in KU. But we shall see! Tell your KU-loving friends. :D 

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is The Write Stuff: What five effective work habits make a professional writer the most successful? I can only tell you mine and that's defining "success" as being productive. The other kind of success - fame, money, adulation, awards - depends hugely on timing and serendipity. But we're focusing on work habits, so here are mine:

1. Consistency

You don't have to write every day, at the same time every day - though I do extoll that as THE single most effective method for building a consistent writing habit - but consistency is key. I build my schedule around protecting my writing time and that habit carries me through all sorts of difficulties.

2. Persistence

The other piece of building a writing habit is keeping it going. So many writers give up without finishing a book - or finishing multiple books! - or they give up after a few books. Or, when attempting to write consistently, they take time off, change their minds, prioritize something else. Persistence is what gets words on the page.

3. Focus

Shut out the world, ignore the new shinies and frolicking plot bunnies. Close the office door, put in the noise-cancelling ear buds, disconnect the internet and silence the phone. Focus on the writing and only on the writing for the time that you're doing it. Think about the story and only that. All other considerations come later.

4. Integrity

Write what you believe in and write it your way. Don't chase trends or try to make your stories a clone of someone else's. This may not seem like an effective work habit, but it is! Keeping to the integrity of the story YOU are telling allows you to focus on that and not the market, or whatever the loud voices are currently shouting about.

5. Flexibility

The previous four have all been about ritual and drawing firm lines, but with those come a need for flexibility. Be ready to change up what you're doing if you have to. Reinvent yourself regularly. Try rebranding series and putting it in Kindle Unlimited. (See what I did there?) The world changes, sometimes rapidly, and we have to be ready to change with it. 

 

Writer Finances and the Myth that all Authors are Millionaires

When you’re start out in this crazy business you decide which publishing track is for you. 

There is:

Traditional - publishing with an established publisher (think Orbit, Tor, or Angry Robot)

Self-Publishing - publishing on your own without an established publisher

Hybrid-author - publishing both with an established publisher and independently

Sounds great! Right? Except you may, or at the very least nearly everyone you tell about your decision to be an author will, assume that means $$$.

So, how do you budget when you don’t have a clue about what you're facing? 

Very…carefully? 

I wrote my first novel in 2013, the one that earned me my Golden Heart in 2018. See that 5 year spread? There was a lot of internet searching and learning happening in that time because I knew I needed to decide what to do with the thing. 

Self-publishing in 2013-2014 had a bit of a stigma for being sub-par, but I checked it out anyway. I’m a laboratorian at heart, I can’t make big decisions without a detailed pro/con list. For information, I attended a couple small writer conferences and attended sessions targeted at traditional and self publishing. There’s so much to that that I could fill your screens for days, or you could check the archives of my fellow SFF Seven’s posts, there be goldmines there. And recently the Fantasy Inn did a great survey on self and traditional publishing, check it out here.

Jim C. Hines did a nice survey in 2010 about first novel deals and earnings. But in all the Publisher Weekly announcements there was cryptic wording on the deal amounts. Thankfully, the Nelson Literary Agency puts out an excellent newsletter and blog, a great follow if you’re in the trenches. Kristin Nelson shared deal-reporting lingo translation. 

Finally! A way to decipher those press releases and find out how much traditional authors make! 

*cue laughing*

Back in 2014-2015 I was enjoying a very successful career in the medical field and determined that the time needed to be successful at self-publishing wasn’t something I had. That left the traditional path, hybrid author really wasn’t a thing back then, and I needed even more info to formulate my ten year plan. 

You read that right, TEN YEAR PLAN. If you don’t have one, you should make one. Being an author is a long road, no matter which path you take. And planning is part of figuring out that elusive author finances.

My ten year plan was to have one book published within five years and subsequently two books per year after that which would allow me to retire from the corporate world and become a full-time author by year ten with ten books on my backlist. 

Best laid plans and all…

I still have a ten year plan, though it looks very different from what I started out with. Due to my chronic disease, I chose my health over my job and walked away from my career in 2018. Unfortunately that means my family is now single-income, my husband is absolutely wonderful in case I haven’t mentioned it recently, and my healthcare takes up about 20% of it. 

Remember the planning carefully part I mentioned above? 

Even after all that, I still have a plan. Technically I have a one year, five year, and a ten year plan, and I’m still collecting information because the most important thing I’ve learned concerning author finances is the need to be flexible. 

Flexibility is key for which ever publishing path you choose. Make goals, set timelines for yourself, and be flexible. Yes, that means flexible with your income as well. 

In the past couple of years there’s been a movement to be more transparent about author income and a number of authors have voluntarily posted about it. There’s been some shared on Twitter, sorry I can’t find the tweets to link to. And Susan Dennard, author of the Witchlanders series, did a post on author income along with her agent (scroll down to the bottom section: For the Daydreamers).

None of this is to bum you out about your future prospects. But if you’re committed to being an author for the long haul, you’ll need a plan for your finances. Otherwise you’ll end up like poor Rob…

But he always looked on the bright side, which sounds like a good idea to me! 

Are you starting out and vacillating on which publishing path you want to take? 

On Trying to Write Short(er) Again

I'm on my way to New York City today, to read at Lady Jane's Salon, hang with Ron Hogan and Megan Hart, and have lunch with my editor.

As one does.

All of this means that my post is going up a little late. Airplanes and blogging don't always play nicely together.

Our topic this week is why we prefer to write long or short.

I actually like both, which should come as a surprise to no one, since I'm always the fence-sitter in all things. I started out writing short - essays and short stories  - and these days I write long. Sometimes I write *really* long. The Talon of the Hawk came in at over 130,000 words. All of my Twelve Kingdoms and Uncharted Realms books are at least 110,000 words.

Writing short was great for me, especially to begin with. I'm not capable of pre-plotting, so writing short let me write and entire story in one sitting, while I held it and all its threads in my head. I also had little time to fit in writing back in those days, so shorter was better.

***INTERRUPTION***

So, as I sat typing this in the Dallas airport, I got the announcement that my flight to La Guardia was cancelled. Worse, they can't get me there for two days, so I'm just going home again. Nothing like a day jaunt to Dallas for lunch!

What was to be a long trip has become a short one. Sometimes it works out that way.

At any rate, in writing those fantasy novels, I discovered the great joy of writing long. I even think of it as VERY long, because it's a long wending tale across the series at this point.

Conversely, with my new Sorcerous Moons series, I've been trying to write shorter again. The first book, Lonen's War, is about 65,000 words and it's looking like the next two in the series will come out about the same. The thing is, part of why I wanted those to be shorter is that I really wanted to write a long-term, slow-burn romance. In some ways that series of three will be like one 200K book.

Or longer. I might not be able to tell it in three books. We'll see.

I try to be flexible.