The Tocking Clock

I am sorely behind schedule.

I’m sore about it because I’m bumping up against these milestones I’ve set for myself in order to meet my goal of publication in December, and also because if I can’t find the time now to do the work, why do I think it’s going to get any better later?

I’m realizing that, once you remove the find an agent/find a publisher piece of the equation, an indie pubber’s timeline is not that different from a traditional publisher. There is a tremendous amount of work to do! And because so much of the work includes sequential tasks, and not parallel tasks, it really stretches that timeline out.

I set my release target as early December. That’s in part because I will turn 30 on December 11^th, and in part because I want to grab at least a piece of the holiday sales action. It’s also in part because that’s about the soonest I thought I could get to where I need to be. Backing out of the date, I need time to get the books printed and shipped. Before that I need to do a round of Advanced Readers Copies (ARCs) to send to reviewers and blurbers in an effort to secure some of those elusive back cover quotes. So before that, I need to have the exterior and the interior done, and at least once-overed by my proofreader. To get the interior done, I need the narrative LOCKED DOWN. I can’t be tinkering with it—at least not in any major way—once it’s layout time.

So where in my schedule do I have “narrative locked down”? Um, August.

Hello, August. I can see you because you are a mere two weeks away. Care to delay your visit for a few weeks while I nail these revisions?

I thought six months of lead time would be ample, generous, even under the constraints of doing all this myself. Add to the work of the actual book itself that I’m planning a Kickstarter campaign and a book trailer, and I need to do a pre-release marketing push: I’ve made myself into quite a busy lady.

Can I make the December deadline? Probably. But I’m not sure I can do it without sacrificing the butt-in-seat time I need to do the revision that will make Secernere shine. I mean, it’s fine now. But I want it to be awesome. My revision plan calls to revise, re-read, and red-line one chapter a night. That plan will take me deep into August, approaching September—and I’ve already missed four days in a row. I’m hoping I can use weekends, holidays, and a few days off to double-up and get back on track. But we’ll see.

There’s always January. Cold, bleak, January, when people just want to curl up beside the fire with a good book. …and spend the Amazon gift cards they got for Christmas.