Author: Lynn

Jeeves and Wooster

Lynn

I’ve been watching Jeeves & Wooster and boggling over a young Hugh Laurie of House fame. :) He was such a cute young man, and of course, Bertie Wooster is nothing like Dr. House so that just makes it all so much more unbelievably fun.

Jeeves & WoosterI would have never realized this show existed if I hadn’t been reading P. G. Wodehouse of late, and then at my latest visit to my favorite bookstore within 200 miles (McKay’s) I came across a set of DVDs for the show.

Jeeves & Wooster covers ground that several of the stories in the collections I’ve read so far covers, but I don’t mind. Now every time I read more in the Jeeves and Wooster series, I hear Hugh Laurie’s and Stephen Fry’s voices. It’s not a terrible hardship. :)

I feel like a challenge

Lynn

I have the intention of writing about 3,000 words today by 4 pm, but I’ve noticed I’m writing at a really nice pace (using timed writing, during my scheduled writing time) and I’m thinking I might like to try a personal challenge today.

I think I’ll try to write my 3,000 by 12 today and take the afternoon to do some proofreading I’ve been putting off.

The first set of numbers is cumulative, the second set is by session. I’ll update as I go.

words time wph words time wph
284 15 1,136 284 15 1,136

Ah! I slowed down considerably for the next few sessions, but I’m going to keep trying. I’m also about an hour behind after a few unexpected interruptions.

words time wph words time wph
284 15 1,136 284 15 1,136
466 30 932 182 15 728
638 45 851 172 15 688
802 60 802 164 15 656

Well, that didn’t work out. :)

words time wph words time wph
284 15 1,136 284 15 1,136
466 30 932 182 15 728
638 45 851 172 15 688
802 60 802 164 15 656
1,030 75 824 228 15 912
1,216 90 811 186 15 744

As you can see, I only managed 90 minutes of timed writing sessions during the 9–12 portion of my schedule today. I will need to improve that considerably to end up where I want to end up today.

My revised challenge is to keep up my pace and reach 3020 today before 4 pm.

The following chart shows where I should be at the end of each hour—not timed hour of writing, but the hour into my schedule. 9–12 comprises hours 1–3, and 1–4 comprises hours 4–6.

3,020
1 503 284
2 1,007 466
3 1,510 1,216
4 2,013
5 2,517
6 3,020

I definitely didn’t meet this challenge but I’m not too far behind where I should be at this time so that’s good. :)

I’ll be back after lunch.

I’m back! And… ouch.

words time wph words time wph
284 15 1,136 284 15 1,136
466 30 932 182 15 728
638 45 851 172 15 688
802 60 802 164 15 656
1,030 75 824 228 15 912
1,216 90 811 186 15 744
1,404 110 766 188 20 564
1,514 120 757 110 10 660
1,717 135 763 203 15 812
1,841 145 762 124 10 744
2,082 165 757 241 20 723
3,020
1 503 284
2 1,007 466
3 1,510 1,216
4 2,013 1,514
5 2,517 2,082
6 3,020

As you can see, my pace has settled around 700ish words an hour since lunch and that means I’m behind, mostly because I just cannot get my timed writing to match up to my scheduled time. I’m at 2.75 hours of timed writing even though I’ve been “on the clock” for 5. I have one hour to complete my words or I’ll end up writing past 4 pm (because I’m getting 3000 words today, one way or another).

Okay, final numbers for the day. I did make it to 3,000, but not before 4 pm. I stopped at about 5:09. However, 240 minutes is only 4 hours but I worked for 7. Not a great work/break ratio there.

words time wph words time wph
284 15 1,136 284 15 1,136
466 30 932 182 15 728
638 45 851 172 15 688
802 60 802 164 15 656
1,030 75 824 228 15 912
1,216 90 811 186 15 744
1,404 110 766 188 20 564
1,514 120 757 110 10 660
1,717 135 763 203 15 812
1,841 145 762 124 10 744
2,082 165 757 241 20 723
2,309 180 770 227 15 908
2,581 195 794 272 15 1,088
2,764 210 790 183 15 732
2,937 225 783 173 15 692
3,196 240 799 259 15 1,036

(Sorta) new and (slightly) improved

Lynn

I’ve been back on the timers today. Although I have no intention of abandoning my schedule, I’m not going to pretend that it’s been doing much for my productivity lately. It hasn’t.

So today, I brought out my trusty timer and started running it.

It has helped a surprising amount. Over 3,000 words worth in fact.

There’s also the fact that I’ve had a bit of a mental shift when it comes to all these tools I need to get me to write. I read a (really) short book on procrastination yesterday that actually spoke quite loudly to me when it started going on about “loss of freedom.”

I realized at that moment that structure often makes me feel like I’ve lost my freedom.

I’ve decided that thought has to go. Frankly, it’s irrational anyway. Even with a schedule, I’m still in charge. In fact, it’s my schedule and I’m the one who wants myself to follow it, so I can do more of the things that are important to me, so how can it be a loss of my freedom?

It’s a paradox! And one I’m not willing to live with any longer. :D

A slow day for writing

Lynn

At the end of the day I was writing only 216 words an hour. I did get up in the middle of writing and dust a few things.

I don’t have any idea why I’ve become so slow. I didn’t used to be anywhere near this slow, but lately (almost the entire last year in fact), I’m even having trouble cracking 500 words an hour. It’s… mind-boggling. Something has to be up. I just can’t see what that something is.

Oh, well. On to tomorrow. I worked the best I could during my scheduled time today. I’ll try to do better tomorrow.

The schedule and self-sabotage

Lynn

I’ve dedicated myself to working with my schedule this week. Staying focused is hard for me. But this week, I’m going to push myself to write during my scheduled writing time. It’s 10:26 and I definitely let myself get distracted from my schedule this morning.

I have to be careful of distractions because I often forget what I was doing before I became distracted. This morning I got up a little late, showered a little long, and then still had to have breakfast even though as I was preparing it I was fully aware of the fact that I should be planning to eat at my computer. I chose not to because I had started reading an article I wanted to finish (big mistake) and then that article had several linked articles that I really wanted to read that I was afraid I’d forget to read later, so I kept pushing off my writing start time.

I have a decision to make right now: finish the articles or start writing, and I’ll be honest, I’m leaning toward finishing the articles and I don’t even know why. They’re about being prolific and maybe that’s it, maybe there’s a part of me that thinks I’ll learn something new and exciting that will suddenly make me break through the wall that keeps me writing slowly most of the time and I’ll totally make up for the wasted writing time just by writing faster.

Isn’t it wonderful to be able to see one’s self-sabotaging behaviors and yet still not be able to do anything about them?

Anyway, it’s 10:21 now and I’m going to skim through these articles and account for the time here just so I can face how much time I am wasting.

I’m back! I did that in record time, because it’s now 10:29 and I read three articles (found nothing new or exciting there at all!), deleted them from Evernote, and am back to this post.

Now, it’s time to get serious here. I have writing to do and I shouldn’t have let myself off the hook today to get started on time. I’m left with 1.5 hours until my break. I want to make them count.

My daily word count has increased since I began following a schedule

Lynn

I had a theory that my daily word count hadn’t increased with my schedule because of how often I seem to be missing the mark when it comes to actually sticking to it.

I was wrong. :)

I wanted the numbers to back up my theory and they didn’t. I then found myself wanting to adjust the parameters of my analysis but realized almost immediately that this would be an attempt to make the numbers prove what I wanted them to prove. So I stepped back to give this some more thought.

I realized I was probably just looking for justification to abandon my schedule. I’ve since moved on (that post yesterday was written after I started this one). I’m glad I resisted!

Although my overall daily average is still down from 2012 and 2013, it’s better than 2014 and even the all time average up until the date I began following the 9–12 & 1–4 schedule.

Since I began the 9–12 & 1–4 schedule: 744 words a day average
All time before the schedule: 658 words a day average

It’s enough of a difference that I can’t ignore it. I wasn’t very productive in 2014 or the early part of 2015 and the schedule has clearly saved me from more of the same.

The only other thing of note is that my daily average for the time period during which I used the 5 minute sessions was just over 1,400 words a day. I was trying to hit a deadline during that time and I was scheduling my 5 minute sessions in one hour blocks and scheduling 5 or 6 of those hour long blocks every day. I take this to mean that if I can stick my current schedule more often and get in the 5 to 6 hours of writing, I can hope to approach or exceed these same numbers without the stress of the timed writing. :) I would still like to see myself reach a daily average of 2,000 words because that would fit with the life I want. :)

 

Knowing something needs doing will have to be enough

Lynn

My response to the pressure that deadlines create? Complete and total shutdown. I don’t deal well with anxiety, stress, overwhelming goals or odds, or pressure. I used to believe I worked better under pressure, but I think that’s just something I told myself after the fact because I had come up against a hard deadline that left me no wiggle room and I had finally overcame the inertia holding me back and got down to business. In a limited sense, I do work better under pressure—because outside pressure can actually make me work whereas I might not work otherwise. As far as quality of that work, well, there’s just no way to know. Doing something is better than doing nothing in most cases, so there you go.

The problem with writing as a career is that there are almost no hard deadlines. Even when something has been promised to a publisher, most writers know they can ask for an extension if they ask soon enough. How hard you consider a publisher’s deadline will greatly depend on how concerned you are with your reputation and how important your self-image as a promise-keeper is to you.

I don’t know how I’d handle it, to be honest, but I have this fear that if I weren’t my own publisher, I’d be in trouble. I generally keep promises, if I see the sense in it and if I care about the person to whom I made the promise, but if I can rationalize it away, then all bets are off. I rarely bend over backwards to make most other people’s lives easier than my own.

I hope this is the last post I ever write about this topic, because I’ve come to a realization today. I have to stop setting personal deadlines and goals and start focusing on just doing the work day in and day out. Consistency is going to be key for me, because I’m not looking for goals: I’m looking for a way of life. At this moment in time, I want my fiction to be the way I earn my living until the day I die. I’m not saying that’ll never change, because I’d like to live a long time and have a long life and maybe that’ll mean I come up on the day when I’m ready for something different. But that’s not today, and I doubt it’ll be next week or next year.

I want to get up each day and I want to write. Some days it’s obvious I’ll write more than others, but overall, I want to write every day and I want a routine that makes it easy to do.

I can’t keep stressing over the goals that I’m not even supposed to be worried about right now, because I’ve got the schedule. The schedule is not working well at the moment, but I’m not giving up on it. It’ll be the backbone of my writing routine.

This post came about because of the aforementioned realization. I was choking under the pressure of the production schedule I created when I decided to focus on my income producing series.

Today, I had to face what I’ve been doing to myself. I made that schedule to see if I could squeeze in the other books I want to write alongside the ones I need to write if I’m serious about focusing on growing my income for a while. Of course, it became a ridiculous expression of everything I know is wrong with the way I think sometimes. I had input deadlines for every book I want to write between now and next year and I had compressed those deadlines to the point that I was going to have to write more words every day than I’d ever written in my life and maintain that pace for weeks at a time.

To remind you, if I focus on my income producing series to the exclusion of my other books, I can write half the number of books in the same time period and yet in all probability earn more money. There’s just no world in which this isn’t the smart thing for me to do, knowing how slow I write.

And yet, there I was this morning, staring at that production schedule and wondering why I’ve been having so much trouble getting myself to write since I created it. It should have been inspiring, I told myself, because it showed what I could accomplish if I just buckled down.

But it wasn’t.

My sanity returned after a flurry of scribbled notes and much too much time spent trying to make it work out to a smaller, more reasonable daily word count average. It’s never going to work out. I just can’t count on myself to write at a steady pace each day and I can’t work to these deadlines. The reason I love writing for a living is because I can take the daily ups and downs I naturally experience and smooth them out into what will become the whole. A book is a book when it’s done; it doesn’t matter if I wrote 1000 words a day for 50 days or if I wrote 0 words for 25 days and 2000 a day for the rest, because I still end up with my book. I can count on my averages. I can’t count on much else.

I don’t want to stop trying to improve my averages, and I’ll still keep trying to stick with my schedule as best I can. I want to improve. But I don’t want to do it with deadlines hanging over my head.

And that’s all I really wanted to say today.

Why I don’t outline my stories

Lynn

All the books I outlined didn’t get finished. I stopped outlining and started finishing things. It was an amazing discovery for me.

One of my series is getting complicated on me though, with overlapping time frames and the like, and I’ve had to create an Excel spreadsheet with dates down one side and book titles across the top and fill in the blanks. It feels weird but I can already feel how much of a help it’s going to be.

My outline ideas were so boring. My stories were boring. I can only have wild flights of fancy as I’m writing, it seems, and that’s what it takes for me to write interesting stories. Some people are creative while outlining (I assume) but I’m not. Every idea I got was just so bland and they made for bland books that bored me to death when I tried to write them.

And that’s why I don’t outline.

I do sometimes write a paragraph or so at the end of what I’m working on that is full of questions to myself about where I want to go next and this can sometimes help me stay focused. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but I’ll leave it there until I either reach that point or decide against it.

Too many days off

Lynn

Now I have to make up for all those days off. I hate playing catch up and I rarely succeed, but if I don’t want to end up moving my deadline, I’m going to have to make a point of writing as much as I can during my scheduled writing time and not get distracted.

Deadline I need to meet

Lynn

I have a deadline for one of my books (the next book in the income producing series) and if I don’t get my work ethic moving in the right direction, I’m going to have to change that date. I don’t want to. I always change dates for deadlines and I’d like to not do that this time.

I have big plans for the future and I need to start sticking some (most) of these self-imposed deadlines or I’m going to have to rethink those plans. I don’t want to do that either. I like my plans just the way they are and they involve me putting out more books, faster, and reaping the financial rewards. Make hay, as they say. The sun is shining. Tomorrow there might be rain.

In light of that, I’m off now to get to work writing. I don’t have quotas to meet on a daily basis because I still believe the schedule is where I’m going to find my success, but I would like to reach 2,000 by my noon break if I can. That’s about an hour and a half away and that means I have to get started and keep going, because 1,333 words an hour is one of those things that I believe I can do but I have yet to prove it to myself or anyone else. :) See ya!

Bought a pretty journal (can’t bring myself to write in it)

Lynn

Isn’t that ironic? I bought a lovely journal to write in, but now I can’t bring myself to write in it because it’s so pretty.

Persian Splendor JournalThis isn’t a surprise to me. I have lots of pretty journals that I haven’t been able to write in. When I get ready to write, I end up pulling out one of the hundred or so spiral notebooks I got for $0.10 apiece at Walmart about eight or nine years ago. I love writing in those things and I don’t know why. I guess it feels disposable. A hardback journal doesn’t and I worry about mistakes.

(I have a real soft spot for blues. Definitely my favorite color!)

Reading too many self-help books of late

Lynn

This is a common problem for me: I read too many self-help books. It’s my favorite kind of nonfiction.

Right now, I’m reading Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith and Four Seconds by Peter Bregman. The sad fact is that I read so many of them, they all get mixed up in my head and I couldn’t tell you much about any of them within a week or two of finishing them. I read Better Than Before a while back, and I remember thinking it was great, but I have no idea what I took away from it now that it’s been a few weeks. :o

I do believe when I finish Triggers, I’m going to take a self-help reading hiatus for the rest of the year and devote my extra time to reading fiction. (I’ve read about as much as I want to of Four Seconds after skipping around the chapters and reading those that interested me.) It’s time to start devoting more time to action experiments instead of thought experiments. :D

A note about my sporadic daily writing journal

Lynn

Another experiment that hasn’t played out the way I expected. I thought keeping up a daily writing journal might give me insight into my struggle to improve my average daily word counts, but I’m finding that more often than not, instead of inspiring me to stay focused, it’s draining energy away from my fiction writing. It’s procrastination by journal and that’s not what I want at all. :o

It’s debatable if I’ll keep the journal going. This weekend I’m going to forgo it, and see how I feel come Monday.

 

Writing: July 23, 2015, Thursday

Lynn

9:59 am

Guilty! I’m starting late again today, although I swear I was ready to go at 9 but something came up. My kids return to school shortly and I know my time will be easier to monitor then, so I’m just biding my time and trying to stay on track as much as I can until that big shift happens.

Now, time to get to work. I have 2 hours before 12 and I’d like to make some real progress this morning!

Writing: July 22, 2015, Wednesday

Lynn

9:49 am

Late start this morning. I can only blame myself because I sat down to write right at 9 am. WIFI going off as soon as I save this post. I feel really focused this morning with my plan. Stick to the schedule. Devote myself to the next book in my highest earning series. Maybe get some time to write on a different book this afternoon if this morning goes well. Here I go!

11:25 am

No words yet! More messing around after I made fresh tea. I’m not sure what’s going on but I think I’m past it now. I’m getting started.

1:48 pm

I’m at 181 words for the day. :o

3:42 pm

At 438 words for the day so far. It’s not more because I napped. I didn’t mean to, except that I really did because I got so sleepy sitting here that my head actually nodded. So I reared back in my seat and closed my eyes for a quick nap. It’s only 15 minutes until 4 pm but I might keep going after that.

3:56 pm

I stopped with 460 words for the day. Getting back into something I haven’t written on in a week just about always takes me a while. I also wrote a novelette in the meantime, and that didn’t help either. Because I didn’t keep working on this story while I wrote the other, I lost my focus on it.

Prioritizing an income producing series

Lynn

It’s come to my attention after a bit of back of the napkin math this evening that I’ve been giving lip service to the idea of prioritizing my income producing series while I’ve been avoiding just that thing.

That back of the napkin math has shown me the error of my ways.

If I focus on writing only my income producing series instead of trying to fit in all the other series I have going (I have five!), I can earn more money with 1/3 of the writing in the next five months. Basically, I can earn more money with 3 new books than I can earn with 6, because of how significant the difference in earnings is between the books in the various series and because I would have fewer books released in my income producing series. (I realize this looks like I did my math wrong, but it has to do with the length of the books and how much I still need to write for each one. In the one scenario, it’s 80,000 words a month, in the other it’s 25,000–30,000 words a month. There were also some other books in there that I love writing but that just don’t earn.)

It was an eye opener for sure.

I have a lot of resistance to the notion of putting all my writing effort toward my one series, but I’ve come up with a mental shift that I think will make it work for me.

  • I’ll have deadlines for the books in the income producing series, but I won’t have deadlines for the other books.
  • I’ll always work on the books in the income producing series first every day, with an eye toward keeping myself on track to finish by my deadline (one book every two months).
  • If I am on track or ahead of pace, then I can devote leftover scheduled writing time to working on whatever book I want in those other series.
  • I’m going to start taking one to two days a week off the writing schedule, based on how I’m staying on pace to finish my latest book in my income producing series.
  • I won’t take off more days than that on a regular basis, even if I am getting ahead on those books. The extra writing time can go toward those books that don’t have deadlines.

The reason I’ve had misgivings about this in the past and the reason I continue to feel weird about it is that the only real way to know if I could earn more money with the books in the other series is if I could put out the books considerably faster than I’ve been putting them out. I would have to put off writing the books in the income producing series so I can devote more time to writing all these other books, but the risk associated with that is just too great. I kind of like having enough money to pay my bills. :D

If I continue to make progress on sticking to my schedule, I should be writing more than enough words to meet my deadlines for the income producing books and get some of the other books written and start having a few days a week off if that’s what I want. (Today was a rest day because I haven’t been feeling well since yesterday, so no guilt for not writing.)

Writing: July 19, 2015, Sunday

Lynn

There’s no entry for yesterday, not that I wasn’t planning to write. But events conspired against it, and I had family issues to deal with. I won’t bore you with the details.

Never mind, maybe I will. My father and son were run off the road by an SUV, driven by someone who didn’t stop after causing the accident. I’ve always said it was other people you have to watch out for when you’re driving because half the people on the road are idiots who shouldn’t be behind the wheel. Yes, they are! Anyway, my family is fine, but I have frustration to work out in my writing and a story to finish today. :D

I’m ready to make up for some lost time with today’s writing. My ultimate goal, and yes, I’ve given in and started calling them goals again, because I just can’t keep doing the mental gymnastics to call it something else, is to have a daily average of about 3,000 words using my schedule. It’s taking me a while to learn how to get there, but I do believe I can.

10:06 am

I’m getting started with today’s writing now. I’ll update some word counts and progress at my breaks.

12:17 pm

I’ve written 521 words this morning. That’s … incredibly slow for 2 hours of writing. :( I can legitimately blame some of that slowness on plotting, but the truth is, the plot is there and I was just tweaking stuff in one particular scene opening to make it easy to follow. I paid for that with a really low word count. I can definitely improve that when I get back to work, but it’s break time. I think I’m going to go ahead and take it now.

9:54 pm

I wrote 1,957 words today, but I deleted 461 words that I thought I’d be able to keep of the last scene in the book that I wrote at about the halfway point through the story. I have to be up really early tomorrow and it won’t be a writing day for a change, but I’m still trying to finish this story before I go to bed. However, I probably won’t take the time to write a final entry for this post until tomorrow or Tuesday. I need as much sleep as I can get tonight!

I wanted more words, and even though I’ll probably get some, I honestly believe I’m only a few paragraphs from wrapping this one up. 3,000 will have to wait until Tuesday. See you then.

Writing: July 17, 2015, Friday

Lynn

9:14 am

I’m a little late getting started, slept badly, went to sleep late even after trying not to, and breakfast took about 35 minutes.

I want to finish my short story today, start the next, and get some words done on my novels. Getting started as soon I can get myself into the short story. I’ll be shutting off WIFI.

11:46 am

I seem to be writing much more slowly today than yesterday. I’m am getting closer to the end finally. I did succeed in fitting in a section I thought I might have to delete. Now I just need a certain scene changed up a bit, and the final scene. I think that will wrap it up, a couple thousand words longer than I meant it to be, but I’ll be done, so yay! Again today I’m not ready for my break yet, so I think I’ll write until 1 instead of 12.

12:37 pm

Somehow I’ve wasted 50 minutes of writing time, not even sure how. I think it was because I slipped a look at my Kindle when I took a quick break. Big mistake during writing time. I have a plan to read in the mornings from 7 to 9, but I should think about coming up with a way to leave my Kindle upstairs until after 4. If I don’t have my Kindle down here, I just read on my phone instead though so there doesn’t seem to be a lot of point to that. Maybe I should try the no forums/blogs/reports until 4 again. It just felt so … uncomfortable. But weak willpower will happen again, even though I feel right now like I could just stick to not visiting those sites during writing time. Okay, anyway, back to work. I want to write 3000 words today and have a normal lunch at 1 pm and watch an episode of NCIS or something while I do it.

12:55 pm

Forget it. I’m stopping for lunch now. I’m just too tired. I need a rest and a mental readjustment before I get started again. Besides, my laptop needs to charge.

1:16 pm

Okay, never mind that. I wrote a bit more and the scene issues are being worked out. Going to lunch now and will be back to work by 2:16 sharp.

5:43 pm

I didn’t restart at 2:16. I felt like I needed a nap and the computer wasn’t charged yet so I took one. Then I did that post on this site about the new pen name. Then my daughter came home and I spent time talking to her.

Since I do want to reach 3000 again, I’m going to put in some extra writing time so I can. I’m only at 888 for the day and I’m really not satisfied with that.

Now I’m getting back to work. I can break through to a new level of daily word counts if I just keep trying and today’s 3000 word goal is part of that effort.

11:06 pm

I really just seemed to run out of time this evening with obligations of one kind and another. I wrote 1,459 words total, but I also deleted 651, so I ended up with only 808 on my daily log, which is significantly short of where I wanted to end up. The 1,459 was half way there, though, and the 651 I deleted was a scene meant for late in the story that I wrote very early on, and it just didn’t work with the story as it developed and approached the end. Tomorrow I will finish this story and move on to the next.

I’d like to be asleep by 11:30 so I can be fresh for tomorrow’s writing, so I’m calling it done. I’m feeling a bit dissatisfied with the day I had today, but all I can do is try harder tomorrow not to let it happen again.

How I’m building my new pen name: Two weeks in

Lynn

Here I’m going to lay out my plan for building my second pen name without doing any kind of active promotion. Active promotion generally means most of the kinds of promotional activities you’ve heard of.

This post is the first I’m going to do for the new pen name. It’s part of my plan to build an empire, so that’s where these posts will go. (Yay! I’ve finally figured out something to put in that category.)

The truth is, I feel like a beginner still, but I’ve been publishing my books since July 2012, three years now. I’ve been a writer since I was a young teenager—a very young teenager. Maybe it’s impostor syndrome or just that I know there’s so much I don’t know (that I might never know) about this business, but it’s hard for me to talk to other writers without feeling like the one standing on the outside of success and looking in.

This post is an exercise in getting past all that.

I’ve learned a few things in the last three years and accomplished a lot, and I think I can make a success out of this new pen name even though it’s getting off to a slow start.

So here goes. I’m not planning to give away my new pen name for this experiment. Seriously. If you figure it out, please do not tell me you’ve figured it out. If I didn’t want to be anonymous, I would have chosen to reveal my pen name(s) right from the get go. I would never out you and I would appreciate it if you didn’t out me. ;)

Thank you in advance for being understanding about that! :D

I first published the new book a few days into July. I published at $3.99 because I had heard from a lot of other authors that that was the best price at the moment, and because experimenting with different prices was the entire reason I wanted to do a new pen name. I looked into the market and saw that this was a popular price point in the genre the new book fits into. I’m not used to pricing this low. It felt really weird.

I sold 8 copies at 3.99 in 3 days, then 0 copies for 2 days. I posted the book on my author site, but since there’s never been any activity there because, hey, no books, I don’t consider my pen name to have any kind of a platform. No twitter, no facebook, no G+ profile. I plan to keep it that way for as long as possible. I have a website for the pen name and a mailing list that readers can sign up to. That’s it.

After the 2 days of no sales, I raised the price up to 6.99. I mean, if I’m not going to get lucky with an unexpected hit right off and sales are going to be slow until the second book is done, then I might as well, right? When I use the countdown deal before my 90 days in KDP Select is over, at least the discount will look better.

I sold 3 books at 6.99 in the next 3 days and then back to 0.

At about the one week mark, I put the book into KDP Select and moved on.

It’s a 328 page book as far as KENPC goes, and there’ve been 3006 pages read as of today.

So somebody’s reading it.

Now the wait is on until I get a second book written and published.

I’ll post first month results when they’re available, but the fact is, I don’t expect much. New pen name, no promo, high price, etc. There’s just no real chance that anything of note will happen until the next book comes out.

My goal is to put out the next book in the series for the new pen name within 90 days. I’d go for 60, but a lot of stuff is going to have to fall into place to make that happen, including me cracking through to a higher level of daily word count. I’m working on it, but I’m certainly not ready to count on it. :)

Writing: July 16, 2015, Thursday

Lynn

8:49 am

So. Yesterday. It didn’t go so well. I wrote just over 300 words. Breakfast is at the table waiting on me so I can finish it quickly and get started on time this morning (the writing schedule is 9–12 & 1–4). I’m planning to ignore yesterday’s failure and just get back to it today. :)

Last night I revisited those book covers I was practicing on. I like them. I am going to decide today whether or not to use them or hold off for something different when I have time to practice more cover making skills.

So, I’m turning the WIFI off (as soon as these windows updates complete) and I won’t be turning it back on until after 4 on the computer. I’ll update this post through my Kindle or phone at select intervals, because I’d like to see some real progress on that short story and on my word count today. :) I’d also like to rebuild my tags in a way that makes sense later today. Maybe I won’t forget!

2:57 pm

I’m just restarting after lunch but I’m at 1,750 words for the day. I only have an hour before 4 and I want to reach at least 3000 today. I’m not sure I’ll make it, but I think I’ll keep going if I don’t.

4 pm

I haven’t reached 3,000 words yet, but I’m really close. I’m at 2,739 for the day. I wrote very close to 1000 words in that last hour of writing, and I’m a lot further along on my short story because that’s the only story I’ve worked on today (actually it’s a novelette now). I don’t feel like I’m all that much closer to the end, but maybe I am. I’m going to continue on after a short (really short) break. I still want to finish that story today.

Also, I’m going to tweak the titles of these posts.

6:24 pm

I’m calling it a night on the writing. I reached 3,333 words and I thought that was a fun place to stop. I’m also very happy that I reached my 3,000 word goal today and I came up with a new tag for these kinds of posts. Well done, self. :)

I enjoy writing these kinds of posts. They seem to help me stay centered in what I’m doing. Sometimes. I admit it doesn’t work all the time.

All in all, I’m happy with how my day turned out.