I'm so, so tired you guys.
I will freely admit that I am routinely devastated by my royalty check. Not because I expect every one of my books to be a block buster, but simply because my current financial situation isn't awesome and I just really need more money coming in. Every once in a while I sit down with my budget and my schedules and try to figure out if there is anything else I can trim, or any more hours I can work. If there is, in fact, anything else I can do to squeeze more time and money out of my day. Every time, the answer is the same. My best option is always: write more books. Step 1: Decide to Write Free Read.
Step 2: Dig Through Abandoned Files Looking For a Scene That Can Be Fleshed Out. Step 3: Find Abandoned Scene Between Two Character That Includes Sweetness, Relationship Building, and A Pretty Good Sex Scene. Step 4: Remember That This Scene Actually Had a Context Once. Step 5: Remember What Old File Context is In. Step 6: Find Three Chapters of Good Stuff in Aforementioned File. Step 7: Remember Two Old Stories that Relate to Abandoned Chapters and Can Be Used as Backstory and Exposition Step 8: Amalgamate Chapters in Scrivener and Change all Alpha Heroes from different patches same name. Repeat with Beta Hero. Step 9: Realize that You Now Have 30K of a Nearly Done Story that You're Too Attached to to Give It Away, and It's Going to Take You A Month to Finish and Polish. Step 10: Decide to Write A Free Read. 1. Pour over your final edits until commas no longer make sense to you as a thing that exists.
2. Ignore the nagging feeling that you are overlooking something major, like a missing chapter, or a character that disappeared in an early chapter never to return and send in those edits. 3. Reset email notification on your phone to update as often as possible. Anxiously await news about your release day/cover art/ boyth. 4. Begin compulsively stalking your publisher’s “coming soon” page to see if you’re inching up to the top of the list. 5. Notice someone way further down the release list than you already has cover art. Experience a moment of anguish and rage. 6. Get a release date. Rejoice! Begin panicking and begging for blog space and retweets. 7. Get Cover Art. Write at least ten statuses and text messages containing the word “Squee”. 8. Compulsively refresh your publisher’s site, Amazon, Bookstrand, and All Romance ebooks, waiting for your book to go live. 9. Get blog space. Watch your posts go live and tweets about you get retweeted. 10. Be very grateful for the support of your fellow authors. 11. Compulsively refresh your publisher’s site, Amazon, Bookstrand, and All Romance ebooks, waiting for evidence of the first sale. 12. Finally get the sale, load your information into Novelrank. Compulsively check that for a few days until you settle into either satisfaction or disappointment with your book’s performance. 13. Write the next one. 14. Tell yourself you're going to write the next one, but instead spend a lot of time drinking wine, eating candy, and binge watching New Girl on Netflix. 15. Actually write the next one. Only two weeks passed between the first word of "Summoning Sin" and sending the whole manuscript into Evernight. It was a story that just clicked and flowed and finished itself. I had fun writing it and I remember the energy of that story fondly. The story that just worked and was, all of a sudden, done. The promo for that one felt like a natural extension of writing process. "One Night Contract" had only been out for a week or so by the time "Summoning Sin" was finished and it was selling faster than any book I'd ever published, and I was already starting on "The Promise of Steel".
Things are totally and completely different for this new release.
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AuthorLilith Duvalier may not be the kind of person who is capable of enjoying her day job. Archives
May 2015
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