On My Mind: A Fork in the Publishing Road

It's 2022, year of the tiger, it's—well. It's that time I've earmarked for stepping back into the publishing game. Which means...it's time to make a spreadsheet! 

When I started writing, my goal was traditional publishing due to time constraints from the day job. Then my chronic disease showed up and I traded in the lab career for my health and continued to pursue traditional publishing due to health constraints. But now that things are settling down, and I’m easing myself back into a writing routine, things are different. 

I read a lot last year and for once I paid attention to who published the books AND how had I found out about the book. 

68% of my reading list was published by the Big 5 (Penguin/Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan). Mostly via their imprints which produce certain genres, like Orbit who is a Sci-fi Fantasy imprint that’s owned by Hachette. I read 9 books from Orbit. 32% of last years’ reads were from small presses or self-published. 

Spreadsheets are fun! But what I found even more interesting was how I found these books. 

• Middle Grade Book (I read to my kids at night—audiobook style): 6
• Found Following the Author: 11
• Part of a Series: 22
• Goodreads: 26
• Library (either on the shelf or from their newsletter): 32
• Instagram: 35

Along with reading a lot I paid attention to various authors marketing strategies and what readers responded with the most enthusiasm. Because everything boils down to what Charissa posted about: know thy readers. If you can find the readers, your book will be seen. 

Armed with spreadsheet info I now come to a fork in the road…one of life’s decisions. Which way do I go? Traditional publishing or Non-trad? It’s like playing the board-game Life and having to decide to go to college or get a job! To add to the conundrum, I write science fiction and fantasy. Do I go the same route with both works?

Things look different now, both in my capabilities and the publishing landscape. A debut author at one of the Big 5 isn’t as likely to get the marketing dollars, so I need to determine what they do bring to the table and is it worth the gamble that my work would earn enough to be considered a successful ROI in their books. A debut with a smaller press would bring different expectations, both with what they provide and what they consider a success. And again, it all comes down to where are the readers.

It’s time to weigh the pros and cons of trad publishing against non-trad. I need to determine what I want to control, how much I can handle, and what I want someone else to tackle. And it might end up being different paths for sci-fi and fantasy.

Are any of you writers debating which path to take with your work? Are any of you writers out there happy with the road you did travel?

Making Time to Read

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is reading! Do you set aside time for it each day? How do you decide what to read next?

Like most (all?) writers, I have always been a reader. My mom tells stories of me learning to read from Sesame Street when I was four, and how she stopped reading aloud to me before bed - a nightly ritual - because I started reading over her shoulder and correcting her mistakes.

So, yeah, I was one of THOSE kids. The ones whose parents yelled at them to get their nose out of the book and look around. The ones who carried their current book to class and snuck reading from it while the teacher was talking. The ones who read widely and deeply.

This continued into my adult life. My husband remarked once that he'd never known someone who read EVERY DAY. No matter how busy things got, I always got in some reading.

The only time this changed was when I began writing fiction.

For some reason, writing books took up the same space in my brain that reading books had occupied. At first I was kind of thrilled, because writing a book gave me the same joy and sense of enchantment that reading one had given me - and it lasted so much longer! And it was MINE! But then I began to see how dramatically my reading had dropped off - and I knew I had to fix that.

So, yes, I set aside time to read every day. At first it wasn't easy to rebuild the habit. I had to make myself observe that one hour of reading. It also took time to resume the habit of picking up my current read during spare moments. But now I read for usually a couple of hours every day.

As for how I decide what to read next? Any of you who've followed me for any length of time should know the answer to this! I have a spreadsheet, OF COURSE.

A schedule for writing?

Sunrise in Custer St Park

photo courtesy of @wyomingflygirl

Way back before I was a starry-eyed writer I thought…well, I thought writing a book was impossible, but I also thought that authors wrote and wrote until the book was done. Oh, what sweet innocence. 

Once I decided to attempt the impossible and write a novel I quickly found out that the book didn’t just pour out in one long chunk. There was a ton of research needed and an even more exorbitant amount of staring off into space required. But the best piece of advice I garnered was Jeffe’s advice to track your writing time. 

And so….spreadsheets! 

If you’re a new writer, or you have writing-time flexibility but struggle to get words down when you do sit down, I suggest trying out the Jeffe-writing-spreadsheet-method. When I did my first writing-time tracking I was still working full time and alone time with my computer was sporadic, which actually came in handy because I was able to compare all times of the day and night. 

My results: 

Creative brain power peaks between 7-11 AM. 

Editing capabilities are sustainable throughout the afternoon.

Writing after 5 PM…forget about it.  

Who out there is struggling to finish that book while holding down the 9-5? The problem with knowing that I was a morning writer was that I still had the day job M-F. To those authors working full time, I salute you and will send you all the good vibes! It’s hard, but it’s not impossible. Keep going and when you do have opportunities to shut yourself away during your peak writing-times, do it and don’t think twice! There’ll be guilt about taking the time and you’ll miss out on events and family/friends, but it’s part of the sacrifice to the end goal. 

Fast-forward a few years and now I’m blessed to have a spouse that can support our family while I’m a stay-at-home author. He’s incredible and the only reason I’m able to write during my peak hours. And it’s made a huge difference in my daily word counts and consistencies, which veers into writing routine territory. For those who have a flexible writing-schedule, once you know when your brain works best then you can move towards a writing routine. And that, that’s a whole other writing post.

Being the Yoda of Long-Term Planning

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is short term, mid-term and long-term planning. I assume as related to our careers as writers, though our topicnatrix KAK did not specify.

I suppose I'm a planner. After all, I am dubbed the Spreadsheet Queen for a reason. I have my writing schedule more or less blocked out through 2020 - though some of that is because I have traditional publishing contracts for books releasing in 2021. Traditional publishing really forces you into the long game, at least five-years out, which I know in many industries barely counts as mid-term planning. Also, because trad publishing is so slow and plans so far out, getting books in that pipeline requires looking ahead a couple of years on top of that. I wrote about this artful juggle back in April. I'd like to get better at this kind of planning with my self-published work, but so far that tends to be short-term to spontaneous.

All in all, I'd say I do a lot of short-term and mid-term (3-5 years out) planning. Longer than that? I don't so much.

Oh sure, I've learned how I'm supposed to. I used to work in corporate America and participated in those strategic planning sessions. I understand how the Japanese plan for centuries out, or however that saw goes.

It just doesn't really work for me. When I think about it, I just hear Yoda in my head.

When I look back, lo these twenty-plus years ago, when I decided to become a writer - and at those ambitious plans, dreams and expectations - I didn't predict very well. Things take longer than you hope, and play out differently than you dream. Also, when I started out I was really too inexperienced to know what would work well for me.

Some of the best things that have happened came out of the blue. I'm Taoist enough to be perfectly fine with the universe bestowing its blessings in its own time.

All that said, the very best thing I have done and continue to do for my mid- and long-term planning is to track how I work. I'm a believer in the concept that the structure of an hour becomes the structure of the day becomes the structure of the week, month, year, and lifetime.

Along those lines I recently initiated two efforts: tracking my individual writing sessions each day and using a tracker for different activities throughout the day.

Each of these is a one-hour writing session (though I track if it's shorter for some reason) and the average number of words for each session. The first tends to be lower because I often backtrack a bit to revise and ramp up, and the last is lower because I'm usually writing to a goal of 3800-4500/day and that 5th session is to pick up whatever remains - often ~500 words - if I have to do a 5th session at all. But it's interesting to me to see that the overall trend does drop off after than second session. This helps me understand what kind of speed and productivity I can reasonably expect from myself.

To track my activities through the day, I recently purchased a Timeular from Zei. That's it in the top photo above. I've only been using it for less than a week, so I'm holding out on the verdict, but so far I'm not in love. I'm not sure their definition of productivity matches mine. Also, I moved to using the app on my phone instead of the dongle on my laptop, because running the dongle/tracking program kept stalling my Word every few minutes. When I'm in the middle of a writing flow, getting that 30-second spinning wheel of NOT RESPONDING got to be infuriating. So, we'll see.

Overall that's more to illuminate how I spend my time outside of actual writing, to maybe pare down non-productive activities. To do that I might have to drill down to more than eight categories, however.

It will be interesting to see how the next twenty years play out!

Juggling Multiple Projects - How to Decide What to Work on Next

Here's me on the Iron Throne (from Game of Thrones, if you're not in the know). I'm feeling like I look pretty natural there. The only thing missing is that I did not yet have my WWJJD? (What Would Jessica Jones Do?) ribbon.

Still pretty kickass, though.

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven (which totally sounds like a superhero group to me, to continue to riff on the theme), is "What next? How do you decide which projects when?"

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!

What is this "decide"?

Seriously - once upon a time this used to be an issue for me. I remember once making a list of a dozen or so story ideas and using a random number generator to decide which to work on next. Long gone are those days! 

Some of this comes from working with traditional publishing contracts. We end up "deciding" to work on whatever thing has the closest deadline. Due next week? DECISION MADE.

But it's also a natural consequence of writing series. If you have one, two, three, more books out there, then readers are going to be messaging about when the next one is coming out. That's a big decider, too. 

Of course, even with supposedly finished series, I get those messages, so...)

All this said, you know me. I keep a spreadsheet. 

OF COURSE I DO.

This is what mine looks like right now. I cropped so as to make it easier to read. As you can see, the "In My Court" section is the most salient. Right now I have four projects all solidly with me and none in "Someone Else's Court." Which is too bad, really. You'll also note that I classify them as either "Up to Bat" or "On Deck." The irony of me using sports metaphors for these should be lost on no one. On the other hand, the fact that I've mixed tennis with baseball says it all.

Also noteworthy is that THE NOISE OF FUR, which has a later deadline than THE TIDES OF BÁRA and SENSATION, is at bat. It seems counter-intuitive, but this is where my deciding comes in. I *had* planned to do revisions on that story starting 9/12 (which you'd be able to see if you could scroll to the right), but two things happened. First, Grace Draven, who is heading up the anthology, TEETH, LONG AND SHARP, that THE NOISE OF FUR is for, asked me if I could send my story to Ilona Andrews, who's writing the introduction. I didn't want to send it in bad condition. But then, second, I received the content edits from my editor and she thinks the story is in great shape! (Such relief!) So, I knew could both polish this story quickly and give it to Grace for Ilona to read. Thus, I did make a decision within my framework to move that up to being at bat and I'll do that today.

Sharp eyes might note that SENSATION and THE TIDES OF BÁRA share a deadline. This is an artifact of me getting behind schedule, which means the deadlines slid and stacked up against each other. In my head I know that the SENSATION deadline is a somewhat artificial one, and that's the one that will slide if one of them has to.

And if they all slide then... WWJJD?