Weekly Writing Intentions: Writing more

Daily Diary, May 28, 2022, Day 636:

This past week my goal was to spend less time writing on these posts and more time writing on my novella. I would say my success was mixed. On one hand, I didn’t do a post on my indie journey, and only one historical tidbit post. On the other, I spent a good deal of Friday and Saturday morning working on my anniversary post, which resulted in very little word count accomplished on Saturday. However, the response to that post was so heart-warming that it was completely worth the time. And, I was able to make up for some of the lost writing time on Sunday and Monday, so the total for the week was 4468 words with an average of 638 words a day.

So, what are my intentions for the coming week? Keeping on with last week’s goals.

I will defer writing up any of my historical research material this week so I can concentrate on my next Indie Journey post, hoping to get it ready for this coming Friday. This post will be on selecting categories, and I have written a lot on this in the past. Consequently, I hope to be able to reuse some of that material so it won’t take up too much time. It is also such a complex subject that I may break it up over two posts.

Another area that I know I will need to be careful about how much time I spend is marketing. I could have gotten more writing done this past week if there hadn’t been so many marketing/business tasks to do. For example, I was delighted that my science fiction book Between Mountain and Sea was made part of the Visions of the Future StoryBundle (which runs through June 16), but that also means I have a responsibility to help market this bundle. Last week, I had to craft and send out a newsletter, incorporate information about it in my daily posts, and mention it on twitter and facebook.

In addition, on June 1, I have a BookBub promotion on my Victorian San Francisco Novellas collection and this required me to change the price to free in time for the promotion. This also required getting KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) to “price match,” a semi-complicated process. I’m not complaining about these marketing tasks, because they all represent good opportunities for getting my books discovered and read, but they did take time––time away from writing.

So, this week, my intention is to limit my marketing time to sharing some of the marketing material from other authors in the StoryBundle and putting out a promotional newsletter on Thursday that will that will include notification of the short-term novellas collection free promotion and other discounts.

And if I am good about limiting my non-fiction activity, this should leave me more time to write. I am on chapter 12, with 4 more chapters to go in my outline. I also hit a total of 26,000 words yesterday. My goal is to get at least two of those four additional chapters written this week. If I am successful, this could mean completing the first draft the following week. Let’s see if I can accomplish these goals!