Self-Imposed Deadlines

When working with a publisher, you have set deadlines; unless the publisher runs into problems on their end, you must meet the deadlines in order to have your book published. If the publisher says they need editing changes by a certain date, do your best to meet the deadline.

If you are a self-pubbed author, using a place like createspace.com to print your books, you have to set your priorities and try to adhere to your own deadlines. What if you miss your self-imposed deadline? Is it a big deal? It may be on yourself but in the end, you know what must done in order to get your book ready to be published.

Set realistic deadlines. Sometimes this is harder than it sounds, especially if you are working with an illustrator or cover artist or graphic designer. These can be all the same person or several different people. Unless you know how to do book layouts and/or have the proper software to accomplish a professional book layout, you will need someone to do that. If you are writing a children's story that needs illustrations, you will need an illustrator, who probably should also design your cover. Make sure you are working with someone who has a good work ethic and adheres to your timeline as much as possible.

This is the tricky part because we all know life happens and sometimes deadlines have to changed, moved up to a better date for both parties or sometimes they inadvertently get missed.

What's the best way to stay on track with self-imposed deadlines? Keep a calendar (either a wall, desk pad calendar or pocket one works well) or some sort of worksheet (can be an excel spreadsheet or a google docs spreadsheet) so that you can keep track of when you want to get your book published. Along with this is the marketing planning that needs to be implemented as soon as you start writing your first draft. Does this always happen? No, again, life happens. If you are a working parent and have small children still at home, it is harder to work on the whole plan in large chunks. By time you get to spend time on writing, it is usually late night or the wee hours of the morning and your sleep hours start dwindling tremendously. If you work outside the home and don't have kids still at home, again you are under stress from your day-to-day job and social life that it is hard to actually spend as much time as you would like on your writing life.

If you fall into a different category, you have to find the right balance. For this writer, teenagers demand much of her time outside of a full-time job. I have to put forth self-imposed deadlines. I need to be more diligent about sticking to my deadlines so that I can get my books out, especially my state books. These have been neglected for the past year but that's not to say I haven't been working on my writing or publishing or marketing during that time. I just have let my self-imposed deadlines become something of the past. When I first began self-pubbing, I worked with my illustrator and we stayed pretty close to our deadlines. She then graduated high school and started college and deadlines are becoming harder and harder to meet.

I guess one could say that self-imposed deadlines are like setting goals and checking them off as they occur. Again, one has to consider everything and everyone involved in the process in order to set realistic deadlines. I had a chat session with my illustrator so that we could work on setting some deadlines. Some items have been neglected for many months and I really need them fixed before moving on to other state stories. Hopefully with exams winding down and the rest of the school stuff slacking off for a bit before summer classes start, she can dedicate the time needed to get her graphic designing business back on track.

Not all the self-imposed deadlines involve others as we have all heard that the writing profession is a lonely one. We all have to sit down and set our own deadlines for different tasks. My deadlines are to at least get several (possibly 3) state stories written within a month to six weeks (hopefully by mid June) and to my editor. Again, she is busy and may not have time to edit so I may be in search of a new editor. If I can at least get the stories written, when it is time for my illustrator to do her magic, they should be ready to go.

The other deadlines involve my short stories and getting them published as ebooks. We have deadlines for "Butterfly Halves" (a YA fantasy) to be published in May; "La Cave" (a past lives romance story) sometime in July or August and "Zombies Amuck" (a children's R.L Stine like story) to be published in October (I think having a zombies story published during October is very appropriate). The last deadline I have is to have Imogene: Innocense Lost completed by November. I hope to have my thoughts for cover to my illustrator so that even before I decide to publish I'll have something to market.

I will strive harder to at least meet most of my self-imposed deadlines and let the rest fall where it may as far as my editor and illustrator are concerned. They know what they have to do and what deadlines they need to meet. They know what their priorities are.

So I ask you, do you use self-imposed deadlines in your business? If so, leave a comment and let us know what kind of self-imposed deadlines you have set for yourself, even if you are not a writer or working on a current project. See you all in the postings - E :)

Ebook descriptions and freebies calendar

I've decided to take all my short stories and put them in the KDP select program to see if I can generate some sales for all my stories. I will leave Finally Home available for Nook and through smashwords (available for all ereaders and PCs) but have just put "The Proposal" and "The Tulip Kiss" in the KDP select program. What this means is that I'm going to run some freebie days for each of the stories and see what I can generate interest wise. All these stories have placed in various contests or been selected for anthology inclusion, so I don't understand why the stories really aren't selling at 99 cents.

Remember that when these stories are offered for free on amazon, you don't need an actual kindle to download them; you can download the free kindle app for your phone, tablet, computer, et cetera. This will allow you to download the stories for free during the time they are offered for free or purchase them when they are regular price.

Here's the setup on the stories:

"Bride-and-Seek" was a selected piece in the SC Writers Workshop anthology, the Petigru Review, which was published for the annual conference in 2008. The selection process is blind and not everyone who submitted a piece gets selected. This story was written as a challenge back a few years ago when my friend sent me a "Haunted Realms" Calendar and Covington Manor was one of the featured places (all the haunted places are based in the UK and overseas). The story goes that the Lord of Covington Manor and his new bride had come back to the manor (they got married around Christmastime or on Christmas) and the bride had the wedding party engage in a game of hide-and-seek. She went off to hide and they all looked for her but no one found her. Rumors were said that she ran away. The groom continued his search for her but to no avail and finally gave into his broken heart, dying some months or years later, still searching for her. It is said that some years after his death a servant was cleaning the manor either to put it for sale or spring cleaning or whatever and stumbled upon a locked trunk in the attic. When he opened the trunk, he found the remains of a woman in a wedding dress. This is presumed to be the bride who went missing all those years ago. I've taken that description of what supposedly happened and rewrote the story with the same ending. I'm listing this story as a paranormal romance (love story with a ghostly twist to it) "Bride-and-Seek" is currently 99 cents and is available for kindle download only. It was just offered as a Valentine's Day freebie with a resultant 360 (maybe 361) downloads over the 48-hour period. It will be "free" again in March and April.

"The Tulip Kiss" is a first place winner in Echelon Press's fast and frigid themed contest (January 2007). We were given the theme frigid for January and had to write a short story based on the theme. My award was ebook publication for six months as the first place winner. The cover depicts a winter scene on an icy, back road where tragedy has just struck a young couple. The tulips come in from my husband's family being dutch and at one point, the Elderings were known for their tulips. This is a love story with a ghostly twist. "The Tulip Kiss" is currently 99 cents and will be offered for free the end of February, a couple of days in March and again in May.

"The Proposal" is the second place winner in Armchair Interviews April Fools Day contest. The basis for this story was that we were given a list of eight words and to incorporate several of them into the story and had to write a humorous romance short story. To date, other than the current free downloads on "Bride-and-Seek", "The Proposal" has been one of my bestselling stories. Even during my freebie days for "Bride-and-Seek", I gained 1 or 2 downloads of this story. I also had it on Smashwords and Nook but took it off both those sites and listed exclusively on kindle this week. "The Proposal" is currently 99 cents and will be run for free the end of March/first part of April as I want to see how well a "holiday" themed story does when it is offered for free during said "holiday" (yes, I know that April Fools Day is not a holiday but it's a fun-filled, practical joke day and that's exactly what you will find in "The Proposal").

"Butterfly Halves" (coming soon) will be added to the calendar once it is published. This story is a runner up in Echelon Press's fast and fanciful themed contest (March 2007) and is about two sisters who both want a butterfly necklace but when they fight over the necklace and it breaks, they find themselves in a different dimension in the future in their lives as they have dreamed of them being. This was a bit whimsical and fun to write. Once it is published, it will be listed for 99 cents and I'll determine free days at a later time.

I have two more stories, "Zombies Amuck" (a second place winning story for a local writing group) and "La Cave" (or "The Cellar" - still am undecided whether to list it in the French title or the English title - but will have to decide when Heather tells me yes she will do a cover for it and whichever she chooses for the cover will be what I go with). More on these two stories when it gets closer time to publishing them (if I get them published - lol). They will both sell for 99 cents when they are published.

Here is the calendar of upcoming free days for the stories:

February 29/March 1 - "The Tulip Kiss"
March 21 - "Bride-and-Seek"
March 21/March 22 - "The Tulip Kiss"
March 31/April 2 - "The Proposal"
April 25/April 26 - "Bride-and-Seek"
May 16 - "The Tulip Kiss"


I've only scheduled 3 days for "The Proposal" for now but will play that by ear as to when the next two free days will be scheduled.

I hope you all enjoy my stories and will tell all your friends and promote the free days as much as you can. I appreciate your support and following. Still looking for followers to receive a free ebook version of my YA paranormal mystery, Finally Home. When I reach 150 followers on this blog, you will be contacted with a coupon code for you to download the story. Please pass the word.

Also, the red/white/blue afghan drawing is still opened. The chances are only $1.50 per one chance or you can purchase 10 for $12 (that's a $3 savings over the individual chance). The drawing will be December 1 with the afghan being mailed out around the 7th of December. For more details on the drawing and purchase links, visit either The JGDS website or my main website and check the events pages.

My work in progress, Imogene: Innocense Lost is still that - a work in progress but there are some things in my head about the story. I hope to publish this story sometime at the beginning of 2013. It will be available in print as an ebook (all places - kindle, smashwords and nook). I need to really sit down and work on it so that I will be ready to publish next year. See you all in the postings - E :)