For Author Crush Month 2012, I wanted to continue my study of self-publishing. So I asked four friends to share with you their self-publishing experiences from four different vantage points. Today, James Scott Bell shares his story of self-publishing shorter works even while he continues to traditionally publish his novels. Please welcome Jim!

So I’m sitting there little over a year ago after having three books come out and looking at these people self-publishing and making extra dough. Sometimes a lot of extra dough. So I finally said, What am I doing sitting here not making extra dough?

My current traditional contract is under a pen name, K. Bennett. This is for zombie legal thrillers, a genre I happened to invent. That left a window for James Scott Bell to start experimenting with e-books. And to become the sort of writer he always admired.

I love the old pulp writers, the guys who made a living pounding out stories during the Depression, some of whom became truly great. People like Hammett, Chandler, Cornell Woolrich. I like the idea of being prolific and being good at the same time.

I started with two collections that each included a complete novella and three stories. I did the novellas in the style of James M. Cain, another prolific writer of the old school.

One More Lie is the title novella of one collection. It’s the story of what happens when you make one bad choice and try to cover it with another.

Watch Your Back is the novella in the other collection, and it’s one of those stories where the too-slick hero gets involved with a femme fatale. Sort of like Double Indemnity. Who is using whom? This collection also features a story readers seem to love, “Heed the Wife,” with the sort of twist ending I love.

I find these types of stories to be profoundly moral. I think the best noir comes out of the view that rough justice happens. It’s not pretty, but it gets the job done.

Also, I put out a collection of some of my articles on fiction writing as an e-book, Writing Fiction for All You’re Worth. And I started a short story series, boxing tales set in 1950s Los Angeles.  The first of those is “Iron Hands.”

All this was done as I completed work on my contracted books. I was busy, but extremely happy. Especially when I started getting those monthly infusions into my bank account.

Here’s the deal: It’s all about options and freedom. So long as you’re honoring your traditional contracts, and you have negotiated them in the proper way, and you’re getting along with everybody, having an independent line that complements your traditional work is a no-brainer. It’s real income, and I have this quaint notion that writers are entitled to earn real income from what they write.

But with this freedom there is responsibility. Being in charge of your own writing means you are CEO of your own publishing enterprise. You can expect to experience the stresses and strains of running a small business. You will need new skills to handle them. These can be acquired, but only through effort and self-discipline.

The most challenging part is internal quality control. With traditional publishing, you’re working with a team of professionals and a window of time of a year to eighteen months per book. One of the most exciting things about indie publishing is the speed with which you can bring out books. But you have to find ways to give your work the attention it needs, everything from cover design to marketing copy to editing and formatting. You simply have to think like a business for all these tasks.

So don’t move too fast. Learn your stuff. Put yourself through a self-imposed meat grinder with your writing. Get critiqued. Hire a good freelance editor. Use beta readers you can trust to give you the straight scoop.

This all takes time to develop, but you need that network. You’re not just going to roll a new car out of your factory in a couple of days. You’re going to need tests to make sure the thing runs and can make a long trip. Turn out a couple of those and you can make it an assembly line.

Which is the coin of the realm in self-publishing. It’s as simple and as profound as this: write crazy good books and stories and get them out into the market. And keep doing that, over and over, for the rest of your life.

James Scott Bell is the author of the #1 bestselling book for writers, Plot & Structure, as well as Revision & Self-Editing and The Art of War for Writers. His latest release is Conflict & Suspense.

Please leave a comment and ask Jim any questions you have about his books or his foray into self-publishing. He’d love to hear from you!

My friend Janice is enjoying a milestone moment. A major traditional publisher will release her novel, Accused, tomorrow! I asked Janice if she would stop by and tell us a little about her journey.

Routine
1. A customary or regular course of procedure.
2. Commonplace tasks, chores, or duties as must be done regularly or at specified intervals; typical or everyday activity: the routine of an office.
3. Regular, unvarying, habitual, unimaginative, or rote procedure.

I begin with the definition of ‘routine’ for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve always wondered if the path to publication for my novel Accused was routine. And second, I realized that the very thing that can make a book ready for publication is commonplace, regular, and unvarying.

Accused, my first book with Tyndale House Publishers, is set for release February 1. It’s ironic to me that Accused is also the first book I ever attempted to write, and the first to be rejected many times. This, I’ve learned, is routine; every writer experiences rejection at one time or another. Few writers can write a perfect first draft that is sold immediately to their first choice publisher. (Can anyone?)

I’ve always loved to read, and when I stepped over the line to try and write a novel, the biggest question in my mind was: Do I have the talent to be a writer?  When I attended a small writer’s conference and heard a speaker say that anyone willing to work hard and study their craft could be a writer, I set about learning the craft, and I dreamed of having a novel bearing my name published by a traditional publishing house.

I’d been writing police reports for a few years and I had to unlearn “the facts, please, only the facts.” To learn the craft of writing novels, I read a lot of books by successful authors on how to write a novel. I read books by successful authors in my genre, Chandler, Block, Crais, Grafton etc. I also read best sellers in all genres, wondering if there were a similar thread in the prose, a trick there I could learn to help me be successful.

Alongside the reading, I was writing. I had an idea for a suspense novel and I wrote and rewrote, wrote and rewrote. I probably drove friends crazy with, “Can you read this bit and tell me how it sounds?” What helped me the most was finding a mentor who was a published author and then a group of writers to talk to and work with through the learning process.

When I thought I’d finally gotten it all down, and printed out what I was sure was the final, perfect draft of my novel, I was certain publishers would fall all over themselves to buy it. I’d followed directions, hadn’t I? Surely that meant success.

It wasn’t success, it was the beginning of a lot of rejection and a lot more hard work. Now came the commonplace, the regular and the unvarying routine of revision, revision, and revision. I’d read in one writing book that a writer needed to go through their manuscript until they were sick of it, then go through it one more time.

A lot of people at this point might say, “What is the point? Why didn’t you just self-publish and forget traditional publishers?”

Because that wasn’t my dream.

Back to routine. The path to publication for me was a lot of hard work, a lot of study and a lot of writing and rewriting. Now, on February 1, 2012, the dream I pursued will come to fruition. My novel will be published by a large, traditional publisher. But what I’ve found even more gratifying than a publishing contract is when someone says to me, “I picked up your book and couldn’t put it down!”

It was a routine of study, reading, writing and re-writing that produced a book I can’t wait to see in bookstores.

If you have any questions for Janice, please leave a comment. She’d love to hear from you!

A retired Long Beach, California, police officer of 22 years (16 in uniform and 6 as a non-career officer), Janice Cantore worked a variety of assignments – patrol, administration, juvenile investigations and training. During the course of her career in uniform Janice found that faith was indispensable to every aspect of the job. She published articles on faith at work, one for a quarterly newspaper called “Cop and Christ”, and another for the monthly magazine “Today’s Christian Woman”.

With retirement, Janice began to write longer pieces and several novels were born. She has a two-book suspense series in print that she calls Brinna’s Heart Series, The Kevlar Heart and A Heart of Justice (Oaktara Publishing). Janice is excited and honored to now be a part of the Tyndale House Publishing family. Accused, the first installment in her new suspense offering, The Pacific Coast Justice Series, is set to be released February 1, 2012, and will kick off a brand new chapter in her writing career. In addition to suspense and action, her books feature strong female leads. Janice writes suspense novels designed to keep you engrossed and leave you inspired.

You can connect with Janice on Facebook and on her web site.

This year, my blog here is going to be all about self-publishing but in the context of being a writer first. As a writer, I’m interested in any opportunity where I get to write stories that make me happy and where readers are going to find and enjoy them. With that in mind, I’ve just submitted a short story to an anthology. Yay!

The good news is that I made the deadline with a half hour to go. LOL!

The rough part was the 48 hours before that deadline.

Oh. My. Gosh. What was I thinking? I quickly got to that point where I was sure I not only sucked as a writer, but was completely delusional as a human being. Why, oh why, had I ever quit accounting?

I’d had the idea to take the discarded beginning of my superhero novel and create a short story about how the couple met. I thought it would be fun and I could put it on my web site for free to introduce readers to the characters. That way, when the novel came out, there would already be readers waiting.

But it had been longer than I thought since I last looked at that beginning. When I was ready to start working on it, in fact, I found two totally different beginnings. Hmm, right. I remember now. Some books have a dozen beginnings before you figure out what the heck you’re trying to do.

No worries. I’ll take the best sections from these two and craft a short story out of them.

Um…except I’ve never really written a short story. I’m a novel girl.

Yeah, I started this whole thing grass-backwards.

So. It’s 48 hours before the deadline. I think I’ve got a pretty good version ready to polish. I sit my butt in the chair at the beginning of the day and find an email from a writer friend with an awesome checklist for polishing. I write her back and tell her I love her. I open my file and start working.

I see something that doesn’t work. It needs to be changed and I have an idea on how to improve it. Ooo, I like it. But I have to go change this other thing to work with the improvement. Hmm, which means this other thing doesn’t work.

I knock my head against the wall and my husband tells me he believes in me. I try again. This sucks. It still doesn’t work. This really sucks. Maybe I should just let this deadline pass me by. The anthology is a fundraiser for my chapter so I won’t make any money (which means I’m not losing any by backing out), and no one is counting on my name to sell books so it won’t hurt the chapter if I’m not there.

I open my email again (because that’s what you do when your writing freaks you out) and find a couple emails from other chapter mates who are also racing toward the deadline. I decide not to give up yet.

I make some other changes. There are still problems. I wander out to the kitchen to find something healthy to snack on. I eat almonds instead of chocolate. John tells me again that I rock and I can do it. I promise him gratitude sex when this is all over. He tells me I really rock.

I keep trying. The next day I find several things that really have to be done before I start writing again. Really. Very important. Trust me.

After a few hours, I ask John if we can switch computers so I can change positions. My butt hurts. I take the laptop to the couch near the fireplace. Apparently the change has shaken something free in my brain. I realize the broken sections need to be deleted not fixed.

A few years ago I found a way to delete stuff that didn’t cause me heart palpitations – a new document called “Deleted Stuff.” Yeah, baby. Over the next few hours I deleted one third of the story. Wow. Then I read it again. I’m a genius.

It’s 8pm and the deadline is at midnight. I’m freakin’ exhausted. But it’s not done, and now I’m committed.

It’s 10:30pm and I’m no longer terrified of what my friends will think when they read this. But it’s not perfect. Keep working.

It’s 11:15pm and John asks me if I’m awake. My eyes are open, but he thinks I’ve learned a new skill. I finish the final read without moving anything but my mouse finger and my eyelids. I move to the other computer and re-read the submission guidelines and attach the document to the email.

I hit Send.

And I tell myself that when I get some sleep, I’m going to feel pretty darn good about myself.

This past Saturday my local RWA chapter (Orange County Chapter in California) met. Our guests were historical romance author Patricia Wynn talking about combining history and mystery, and Carina Press’s Angela James talking about publishing in the digital age. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole day and thought I’d share some of the things I found most interesting.

PATRICIA WYNN
Though I don’t write or read historicals (except for the occasional regency romance) or mysteries, there were a couple of things Patricia said that struck me as useful in my writing.

• She believes your story should grow out of the setting in such a way that it couldn’t happen just that way in any other place, at any other time. I started thinking about my superhero books and wondered if I’m doing enough with setting.
• In terms of scene and sequel, Patricia said that if you have fewer and shorter sequels, you will increase the pace and the tension of the story.
• Another thing that will increase conflict and tension is giving your protagonist fewer people to talk to and confide in. At first I thought, I’m not getting rid of Tori’s best friend or her sister. But then I thought, all I have to do is create reasons why she can’t confide in them, or can’t confide right away.

ANGELA JAMES
During Angela James’ talk, several topics caught my attention.

• Authors need to understand their contracts before they sign them. (I strongly agree as a business person. I know several authors who couldn’t tell you what their royalty percentages are, let alone on what basis they are calculated.)
• She wouldn’t suggest that an author already getting published by a traditional print publisher switch over to an epublisher just because of the better royalty rates for ebooks. There are many factors to consider, and there are still a lot of benefits in being published by a traditional print publisher like Harlequin.
• It’s to an author’s advantage for the option clause in their contract to be as narrow as possible. You don’t want to sign something that sells all rights, in all territories, in both print and digital and in every form yet to be created, in perpetuity. Remember you are licensing your work, not “selling” it. (See the blog by Kristine Kathryn Rusch discussing both licensing and how writers are agreeing to be paid less than in the Great Depression.) Know what the term (length) of your contract is. Once you sign it, you’ve agreed to that deal for that length of time.
• The greatest position of strength for either party trying to come to an agreement is their willingness to walk away from the negotiations. Know where you stand, what you’re willing to accept, and in what areas you won’t negotiate. Almost all contracts are negotiable, but not all sections of the contract are negotiable.
• In answer to the question, “Why should I choose Carina Press or any other publisher over self-publishing?”, Angela smiled and said, “I don’t think all of you should.” She said some self-published authors have made it very clear that they hate to be edited. That’s one reason not to try to find a publisher – you’ll both end up miserable. Some people like the inherent control in self-publishing. Others like that a publishing house is doing more of the work (for more of the money) so that the author can spend more time doing what they presumably do best – writing. And she reminded us that there is still a lot to be said for a brand. Harlequin, Penguin, Random House (my list, not Angela’s) are still powerful brand names that people associate with quality books.

Angela’s talk gave me a lot to think about. I agree that there are more benefits to being published by a publishing house than self-publishing and doing all the work yourself. But I agree with people like Kristine Kathryn Rusch and J.A. Konrath who believe that there are better ways to pay for the services than to pay a large percentage over the life of the contract (which can be forever, depending on what you sign).

THE COST OF SELF-PUBLISHING
Self-publishing is expensive. I firmly believe an editor will help you write a better book. How many times have you heard an author say that their editor pushed them to make changes the author wouldn’t have made on their own, changes that made the book better? But many (most?) self-published authors don’t spend the money on quality editing. (I’m talking about both content/structural editing and copy editing.)

I expect to have to pay hundreds of dollars per book for the right content editor, and additional fees for a copy editor. I’m going to start paying someone to format my books as soon as I have some extra money to do so. Meanwhile, I have to accept the opportunity cost of doing the copy editing and the digital and print formatting myself: for every hour I am not writing, I am potentially losing money. And there are many more expenses that I have to pay for out of pocket as well.

It’s a difficult path I’ve chosen. I’d add one more reason to Angela’s list on why you should choose self-publishing over licensing your work to a publishing house: because you really get a kick out of creating your little business yourself!    That’s how I feel. And I think I’ll continue on my path as long as I feel that way.

Happy Monday! As part of the changes this year at Routines for Writers, I am now starting your week with news and information about my self-publishing journey. Since it’s tax time and time to finish planning out the new year, I thought I’d compile my revenue and expenses and share them with you.

In the following list, I did not include any revenue or expenses for 2011 that were not directly related to self-publishing. All the things I bought or paid for that I would have spent money on anyway – books, DVDs, conferences/speaking events, online classes, web site, software, etc. – are in addition to these numbers.

EXPENSES

In April I started thinking I would probably self-publish if I didn’t hear good news about my genre at the Romance Writers of America national conference, so I started buying books and ebooks on how to publish ebooks. I spent $12.74 on five ebooks between April and August. I self-published Little Miss Lovesick in September. Then I spent $67.59 on three trade paperback books and three ebooks between September and December. I also bought a copy of my book for $0.99 at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble so I could double-check the formatting.

My husband is a former graphic designer so I paid $9.99 for the photo we used to create the cover, and my husband gained a lot of points to leverage against chores in the future.   I spent $15 on an online class where I learned how to format my book for Kindle, then I did all the formatting myself.

I decided that I wanted to own my ISBNs, and I wanted enough of them to continue publishing years into the future with consecutive numbers assigned to my “publishing company.” So I paid $575 for 100 ISBN numbers. I also paid $57 to file a DBA (Doing Business As) form with the State of California to use Daydreamer Entertainment as my company name. (It’s not a corporation or an LLC, it’s just permission to use a name that is not my own.)

PUBLISHING THE BOOK

I uploaded the book to Amazon on September 17. But I was pretty sure I had a formatting problem, so I asked all of my friends not to buy a copy until I fixed it on September 22. I decided I wanted to price books the way I like to buy DVDs at Best Buy and Target: on sale when they first come out, and then full price after that with occasional sales. So I set the price at $0.99 for 30 days…which really means 5-6 weeks by the time you wait for your changes to take effect across all venues.

The book went up on Barnes & Noble on September 22 and Smashwords on September 21. If you aren’t familiar with Smashwords, they distribute my book to the iTunes store, Kobo, Diesel and more. There are a couple other venues I want to use, but with the move and the holidays, I haven’t been able to complete the work yet.

SALES AND REVENUE

I think the minimum that you have to earn before getting paid (on all three sites – Amazon, B&N and Smashwords) is $10. You can download a spreadsheet showing your sales and revenue from Amazon and B&N, which I have done every month. I’m not sure about Smashwords; I have a spreadsheet with all of my sales across all their distribution channels, but I’m still reading it over and figuring it out. It looks like their spreadsheet is only available by quarter, but it includes what countries you’ve sold to. Cool.

For September through December, 2011, I’ve earned $5.39 on 17 sales from B&N, and $8.11 on 8 sales from Smashwords (for sales to Smashwords and Apple customers only, so far). Again, I won’t get paid by either of them until they owe me at least $10. As seems to be so often the case, the biggest sales are from Amazon. I’ll break it down by month.

September – $13.65 in earnings on 39 sales, paid on November 29th; $0.26 on 1 sale in the Amazon UK store, unpaid until I reach $10.

October – $12.15 on 33 sales, paid on December 23rd; no non-U.S. sales.

November – $22.05 on 9 sales, not yet paid; no non-U.S. sales. (At the end of October, the price changed from $0.99 to $3.99. You can see what a huge difference it makes!)

December – Reports are generated on the 15th of the month (next week), but it looks like Dec numbers are approximately $9.65 on 4 sales. That means I won’t get a check in February.

THE BOTTOM LINE

My total earnings for 2011 is $71.26 on 111 sales. (Of course, that’s not what I’ll report to the IRS. That number would be $25.80, the amount I actually got paid in 2011.) Total expenses for 2011 per the above is $739.30. (That is the number I’ll report to the IRS, in addition to other expenses, because I really did spend it in 2011.) That gives me a net loss of $668.04 for the year. (Again, not the number that will appear on my tax form because I had other writing-related income from teaching online classes. I just want you to understand the difference between the numbers as I’ll be presenting them to you throughout the year, and the way you report a cash-basis business on your taxes.)

You can look at these results from a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty perspective. People who have been doing this longer than me seem to agree that it takes about a year for you to really see progress, and it’s quicker if you have multiple books out. I’ve heard that nonfiction sells better than fiction; I’ll let you know if that’s true for me when I put out my nonfiction ebooks. In the “corporate” small business world, common wisdom is that it can take up to five years to start seeing profits and have a business that supports you financially. I expect I’ll be closer to the one-year mark than the five-year mark, but only time will tell.

On days when I feel despondent about the numbers, my awesome husband reminds me that a few months ago I’d sold zero books and earned zero money from my fiction. This, from a self-proclaimed pessimist, so you can see why it cheers me up so much.

Today’s a new day, it’s a new week, a new year, and I’m feeling optimistic. I have a lot to do and most days I don’t know how I can possibly do it all. But every journey is one foot in front of the other, one mile after another, so I have to focus on what to do NOW and what to do NEXT and leave the rest of it on my To Do List.

Again, ask any questions you want and I’ll try to answer. And if you’re interested in planning out your 2012 writing year with me, sign up for my online class. We start next Monday.

Until next week, Happy Writing! 

It’s that time of year – time to see how we all did on our 2011 writing goals. You know that we take our writing goals fairly seriously here at Routines for Writers. We may or may not accomplish what we set out to do, but we do try to keep track. That helps to hone the following year’s goals so that we’re always closer and closer to creating goals we can accomplish. Very important for self-esteem and momentum.

Last January I taught an online class on goal setting and time management (I’ll teach it again this January) and at the end of the class I posted my goal list along with all the rest of the class. Here are my goals for 2011 along with what I accomplished.

TOP 5 GOALS FOR 2011

Finish Superhero Book
To be blunt – it didn’t happen. I lost my confidence while getting critiqued by my classmates who were more on the literary side. Plus, after the RWA Conference, my goals changed significantly. See below.

Submit Superhero Book
Sort of done. I didn’t submit it officially, but I did pitch it to a couple agents and editors at the RWA Conference this summer. One agent asked me to submit it officially, but the feedback I got from the editors was that they didn’t know how to successfully sell romantic comedies (enough to make it worth their while to buy). So I made a decision not to submit it to the agent and possibly wait for a year or more to find out no editors wanted it – like I’ve done in the past. I made a career change decision. Keep reading.

Write First Draft of Angel Book for Master’s Degree
I thought I’d be able to pound out the first draft of this in my last semester of my master’s degree, but two things happened. One, we found out that John’s job was scheduled to end a few weeks before my final classes, so I had to reschedule everything so that I took nearly twice the load a semester early so I’d finish just in case John didn’t get renewed. That made it difficult to get as much done as I would have if the load had been spread over two semesters. Good thing, though, because John’s contract wasn’t renewed.

Two, I found it difficult to connect with my teacher for my final class where I was to write my book. She and I had completely different ideas about what constituted a contemporary Young Adult novel aimed at the American YA market. I felt like I was fighting her the entire way. By the time I got to the end of the class, I no longer knew what I wanted my story to be about. I’ve got some of the worst writer’s block I’ve ever had on this book. My solution – start over.

Finish Master’s Degree
I DID IT! YAY! There are pros and cons to this of course. The great part is that I did something I really wanted to do. The hard part is that I found myself second-guessing myself and my story ideas most of the time. There were a few times when I really felt encouraged, and I need to keep my mind on those moments. But it’s taken me these last five months to begin to regain my equilibrium. It’ll take me a bit more time to get ahead of the game confidence-wise.

Start My Author Web Site
DONE! YAY! Of course, there is a TON more to do that I haven’t had/taken the time to do. I’ve got a 2-page list of things that need to be done on the site in 2011. But at least I made my goal of starting the site. Next year I can make and meet some of the goals on that 2-page list of mine.

SECONDARY 5 GOALS FOR 2011

Attend RWA Conference in NYC
DONE! YAY! The morning after my last master’s degree class I got on a plane in Sydney and headed for New York. (I loved New York City!) I’d been thinking about the pros and cons of trying digital self-publishing if things didn’t go well at the conference. Doing some research, it looked like something I could do, something I might enjoy doing. So when I didn’t hear anything encouraging about the current market for romantic comedies, I went home with all the information I could gather from workshops on epublishing and self-publishing.

That’s when I altered my goals for the year. My new goal as of July 6th was to get my romantic comedy Little Miss Lovesick digitally self-published by the end of the year. Within a couple weeks, I’d altered the goal to get the book out by the end of September. On September 21, I MADE MY GOAL!

I also wanted to get my book in print before Christmas. I’d made a tentative goal of December 1st, knowing that I may or may not be moving then. Turns out I did move, so now my goal is to get it in print before the end of the year. The more I learn, the more I’m not sure if I can do it. I’ve decided to spend the time needed to do a great job rather than hurry to try to take advantage of the Christmas rush. But I still hope to get it out before Christmas.

Run 2 Half Marathons and the City2Surf Race in Sydney
There is a trio of running events in Sydney that is comprised of the Sydney Morning Herald Marathon and Half Marathon in May, the 14km City2Surf race in August, and the Blackmore’s Running Festival Marathon and Half Marathon in September. We ran the last two in 2010, and we wanted to do the trio in 2011. Unfortunately, I had nearly two semesters’ worth of classes happening at the time of the May race, so there was no way I could train for a half marathon. We ran the City2Surf in August and beat our 2010 times – yay! And John was deep into overtime on Happy Feet 2 by September so there was no way we were going to be able to run that race. Still, we kept running all year. That was a huge win for us!

Visit New Zealand
I didn’t think we’d be able to find time to take a trip between school and work, but work was the key to our trip. John wanted to see Wellington, New Zealand, where Weta Digital is located, to see if it was the kind of place we’d like to live. We only got to see Wellington, not the surrounding countryside or any other towns, but we got to be there for five days! Yay!! It was awesome!

Finish Jessica’s baby blanket (Caroline was born in 2009!)
I’ve been working on this blanket for two years! I still haven’t finished it, but I worked on it. (I tried a new crochet edging that is super cool but incredibly time intensive. Time is something I haven’t had a lot of since mid-2009 when I was halfway done with the blanket.) I have to finish my goal of getting Little Miss Lovesick in print first, then I can work on finishing the blanket. Thankfully, Jessie is happy to get it whenever I finish it.

See More of Australia Before We Move
We didn’t get nearly as much exploring done as we wanted! Very sad. But we had to keep in mind that we were doing other things that were important to us – school and work. Still, we saw a good amount due to our friends. We went to Melbourne for our anniversary in 2010 and we wanted to go back, but we didn’t have time. However, our friends took us on day trips to Hunter Valley (wine country), the Blue Mountains, and pretty drives around the area. I guess the only way to see more is to be on vacation for a while. LOL!

So there are my goals and what I accomplished. Not bad. And here is the reason I believe in both writing down your goals, and looking at them later: you see that you did more than you thought you did. At least, that’s the case with me. I was wondering if I’d accomplished much at all, but I see now I did pretty good, especially considering I was a full-time-plus student for half the year.

If you’ve been thinking that you need to get your goals not only written down, but broken down into workable chunks, take my online class next month. There are no formulas that you have to fit your life into. I’ll give you several ideas on how to proceed and you use what works for your personality and lifestyle. The goal of the class is to come away with a workable plan, and to know how to change it if your circumstances change (as mine did twice in 2011).

How about you? What goals did you accomplish in 2011? Next week I’ll show you a rough draft of my 2012 goals. Think about yours and we’ll compare notes.

I have no idea since I have simply advanced to Round Two of my first 50 pages. This, after I can’t tell you how many drafts I worked over on my own.

Yes, you heard me. I’m only working on the first 50 pages.

I spent the entire weekend on my first chapter alone. My husband told me I was getting a little moody. Something about me staring angrily at my computer among other behaviors.

That particular moment was probably when I was thinking, “I can’t do this. You want MORE? More emotion? Show motivation? Go deeper? How can I do all that without slipping into the dreaded “telling” and breaking the no-backstory-in-the-first-x-number-of-pages rule?”

But then, I GOT IT!

I got how I need to change my POV style to go deeper. Still using 3rd person, but allowing the voice of my character to come out. I also rounded out some plot points and some underlying motivation and I broke that little backstory rule so I could get the motivation across better.

Part of my editing process has been letting go of what I first thought the story and characters were about and embracing what they are becoming.

And my first chapter is so much better. So much smoother. Makes so much more sense.

But if I have to do this for every stinkin’ chapter I will never get finished this book.

That’s not true, because I have writing routines! I know I just have to keep applying what I’ve learned and move forward.

Put the time in.

Day after day and the next thing I know, I’ll be on my last 50 pages.

Ah, more revision. I got back another set of notes yesterday. Still more work to do.

Layer after layer, one day my WIP will read like a published book. And then it will BE a published book. *cue dream sequence*

Have you got someone to push you harder? Not just the cheerleader who tells you she loves your work and thinks it’s only a matter of time. But someone who will read your chapters again and again and make you revise again and again. Not just anyone, but someone you trust that knows your genre. (You do NOT want to revise to bad advice!)

As hard as we push ourselves, learning story structure, characterization, plot twists, similes and anaphora and epistrophe, we are still too close to the work to see what is not there. Or what is too much there.

And sometimes we (me?) are lazy. We try to get by with good enough. Close enough.

But the market is too tight. Too tough.

After reviewing her notes, my critiquer asked how I was feeling about what we talked about. My first thoughts were, “This is going to be hard work!” I thought I had already put in a lot of work. I know I had already put in a lot of work. In fact, I’ve spent more time on this one WIP than on any other I’ve written.

And I will put in more time.

Time for another handy-dandy self pep talk.

A few months ago I sent an email to Kitty and Stephanie telling them that maybe I should take a break from writing and channel all my energy into gardening. (They’ll never have to talk me off a ledge—scared of heights!—but they do have to talk me out of my garden.) And then I received some fab feedback and went right back to revising.

And yesterday? I bought plants.

I always know when I’m frustrated with the writing game when I’m off to Lowes to buy plants.

It’s not that I’m a good gardener. My son calls me the Plant Killer.

Maybe it’s that the feedback with plants is quicker. I can kill a plant in less than a week (succulents) but then I learn from my mistakes and try again. (Two pots of succulents on the back patio, looking a little rough, but alive!)

We have a corner of our yard that we call the Circle of Death. Everything we have ever planted there has died, except for a patch of resilient Bermuda grass which we did not plant and we want to die off. I am determined to find the right plants for this spot. Just as I am determined to publish traditionally.

You see, I watch my kids read physical books. They don’t read ebooks. I have to remind them when they have a book to read on my Nook because they won’t pick it up themselves. And when they have their dad’s ipad? They aren’t reading. They are playing Angry Birds or Battleship or Barbie Fashionistas.

I want the partnership you get with a traditional publisher. Yes, I understand a lot of the marketing falls on my shoulders, but not all of it. For example, I have no idea how to get my book into the Scholastic Book Clubs. But my one-day-future publisher will.

And so I wait. And garden.

At long last, I have reached the next stage of my journey – I have a book for sale! Woo-hooo!!

Little Miss Lovesick took a long twisty road to get here. A very long time ago – 1997 or so – it was a proposal for an anthology Tyndale House Publishers was putting together. The editor passed, but asked to see more work from me.

I met a Silhouette editor at a Romance Writers of America conference a couple years later and pitched her the idea. She wanted to see it, but by the time I had the proposal polished and ready to send, she wasn’t with Silhouette anymore.

I decided that pursuing Harlequin/Silhouette was still a good idea and did some more work on the story, trying to figure out what line it most closely matched. I read a bit of it to my friends Lauraine Snelling and Kathleen Wright when we were off on a writing week together. They were polite but not overwhelmed. That said to me that it wasn’t a very interesting story. Maybe I should just forget it.

Then Lauraine asked me if I had heard of chick lit. I hadn’t, so the three of us did some online and bookstore research. I was gobsmacked! This was exactly the kind of voice I’d write in if I didn’t have to write towards the expectations of one publisher or another. The next day I rewrote the first chapter into more or less what you see here in Little Miss Lovesick and read it for Lauraine and Kathleen. They laughed so much! I was thrilled!

Then Lauraine picked up her cell phone and called her agent. “I’d like you to read something,” she said. I didn’t know if I was going to throw up or pass out! But chick lit was reaching its zenith and passing away. Though the agent received two “we almost bought it” replies from editors, all the publishing houses we sent it to passed.

And for the last seven years, the book has languished on my computer.

Then I heard about digital self-publishing. Other authors were giving it a try without a publisher behind them, and they were succeeding in varying degrees. I figured, what’s the worst that can happen? The book isn’t doing me any good on my computer. So when I finished my master’s degree in June of this year, I dusted off the book and did a little more editing based on the comments of the editors who had passed on it years before.

I put my entrepreneurial hat back on and filed a DBA (“doing business as”) to work as Daydreamer Entertainment, the publisher of Little Miss Lovesick. And voila! A lot of hours later, I had a book! Out in the marketplace! Yay! As a co-owner of our little business, John did the cover design. Lovely, isn’t it?

Right now the ebook is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords. Smashwords will help me get it into the Apple iBookstore, Kobo, and Sony. I’m working on getting it into All Romance eBooks and XinXii this week. Then I’ll start working on the print version, which I hope will be available by December 1.

If you don’t have an ereader, you can download an ereader app to your smart phone, your iPad or your PC or Mac computer. Or you can check back here or at my web site or on my Facebook page to find out when it is available in print.  :)

So that’s the story. My career has taken a new direction and I’m loving it! I’m exhausted, but I’m happier than I’ve been in years! (Thank you, God!) Whatever you’re doing, and however hard it’s been, don’t give up. Anything could happen at any time to change your life for the better. I’m proof of that.