May Progress Report

Sometime last month, I realized I completely skipped my April progress report, so this update will stand in for both April and May.

Goals for April:

• Write 15,000 words on The Demon Wore Stilettos.

That manuscript is currently sitting at 11,275, so even now, two months later, I haven’t hit that goal. There’s a reason for that, which is that I got distracted cleaning up my Contemporary romance, Girl’s Best Friend. It’s currently about a week’s work away from being ready for my beta readers.

Being ADD (undiagnosed) does not help in meeting project deadlines.

• Prep my first-ever newsletter to go out May 1. (If you’re interested in receiving it, you can sign up here.)

Okay, so that didn’t happen either. It would have gone out June 1, but when I looked at my MailChimp account, I realized it included my home address. And while I realize that anyone can Google my name and find my address, just sending it out felt like a bad idea. So I arranged with another local author to split a PO Box.

It went out today–to a grand total of 21 people, two of whom I don't actually already know. (Fans!). All the experts assure me that a newsletter is the best way to grow my mailing list, and that may be true, but the best way to grow my fan base is to actually start publishing books.

Which will happen September 1. I’m 95% sure of that, because The Demon Always Wins currently sits with the proofreader. From there it will go to the formatter, who has promised me it will be ready to load onto Amazon for pre-orders by July 15.

• Design updated business cards with my branding to take to Denver for the RWA national conference in July.

Decided not to do that. I’m not sure how much value business cards really have these days, and I have existing ones (that aren’t my branding). I decided not to spend the time and money.

• Decide on some swag to put in the Goody room at the RWA national conference.

After much soul-searching and discussion, I elected to go with bookmarks. Spark Creative Partners, the lovely people who created my website, are working on them as we speak.

In addition to these accomplishments, I also received The Demon’s in the Details back from my editor, Karen Dale Harris, who had surprisingly few edits. By “surprisingly few,” I mean her edit report was fifteen pages, compared to the thirty-pager I got for The Demon Always Wins.

Goals for June: (there should be background music with drums thudding louder and faster as we move toward the wire.)

1. Buy ISBN’s. (You can read about that here.)
2. Study up on how to load a book to Amazon.
3. Finish this draft of Girl’s Best Friend and hand it off to some beta readers.
4. Figure out how to address the issues my editor raised with The Demon’s in the Details. (I said she had fewer edits. I didn’t say they were easy.)
5. Get ready for the RWA National Conference in July. As a GH finalist, I will be attending a reception with agents and editors, as well as the luncheon where the awards will be presented to the winners. Since my post-retirement wardrobe doesn’t have a lot of fancy clothes, this requires some planning and, if I can't figure out an alternative, shopping.

What’s on your agenda?