And Yet More Reasons to Stick With Your Writing Schedule

Time is an anchored author’s most precious and rarest commodities, and as your writing career picks up, time becomes harder to find, and more needed with every passing day.

When you first start writing, all you have to worry about is carving a few hours a week out of your day-job anchored life, in order to produce manuscript pages.

Once you sell your first book, suddenly you must find hundreds of hours a year from your spare time and your writing time, in order to market your new novel to readers. It’s not a gentle upslope, either: The first book needs more effort to reach the same people than the fifth book, because everything is new, no one has ever heard of you, and you’ve got so much to learn and so much to build (websites, social networks, your entire platform).

Once you have a few books published, and you’re still holding down a day job, time conflicts become particularly acute. You’re wired into the industry, have contacts, networks and a reputation to uphold. To all intents and purposes, you’re juggling a full time day job, and a career that really needs full time commitment, except the money isn’t there to justify it. And on top of that you must maintain some semblance of a balanced life, or you’ll come off the rails over the long term.

The final dollop of joy is this: from the point of being published onwards, the publishing industry will treat you as if you’re writing full time.

Oh, if you lay out the figures for them, most publishing professionals will nod in agreement that, yes, most authors are holding down day jobs. But in practice, they forget that fact. Because they’re working in the industry full time, that’s their default modus operandi.

Which is what happened to me for the last week: I was asked to produce a full book proposal, from scratch, in ten days. That included brainstorming the concept.

I met the deadline. Just. But I had to throw a lot of what I consider to be cast iron priorities out the window in order to do it. I guess they’re not that cast iron, huh?

The point I’m taking so long to make is two fold:

1) Understand what your priorities truly are.

As an anchored author, your priorities are a) meeting publisher requests and commitments, and only then b) meeting expectations of your readers.

You don’t get readers without having the publishers in the first place, so for that reason I didn’t update my other blog, Stories Rule!, which is for my readers. Anchored Authors, unfortunately, was an easy choice to offload, because I’m doing it for no other reason than I have a lot to say about this subject that I think other authors might find useful. There’s no profit in it (although I do bury the odd Amazon Associates link in the text…which makes me about $10 a year if I’m lucky).

However, I did try to keep the blogs going while I was doing the proposal, until it became clear that I wasn’t going to meet the deadline doing both blogs and proposal.

2) Sticking to your schedule of writing, marketing and living your life pays off in the long term.

If you’re on top of your writing production, taking a few days or even a few weeks off to get an unexpected, urgent writing project done doesn’t hurt as much as it would if you haven’t produced a book in six months. In the latter situation, you might be tempted to not bother going back to the manuscript at all, and things can crumble quickly after you’ve reached that point of ennui.

For a similar reason, if you’ve been keeping up the care and feeding of loved ones, your health, and general household maintenance, then the house won’t completely collapse while you’re ignoring it, and you won’t look around, blinking, at the end of the urgent project, to find your partner moved out while you were ignoring them.

Have you written, today?

Will you be writing this evening?

If you’ve been floating for a few days, thinking that the anchored life is way too hard to keep up over the long term, and you can afford to take a break, it’s time to put the traces back on.

Promise yourself that you’ll blow the dust off the manuscript today, and take whatever time it takes to write one paragraph.  That’s all.  Just one paragraph.

Bet ya can’t stop at just one, though.

Enjoy.

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First appeared on Anchored Authors, August 13, 2008.

© Tracy Cooper-Posey 2008. Cannot be copied or distributed without permission, or without this copyright notice attached.