Time Management: more time for Russian Brides.

A Time Management Guy.

For a writer time management is crucial. It doesn’t matter whether you do it full or part time.

When I run out of story ideas, there are plenty of other things to work on. Right now I have a story that was just rejected. The best thing to do is read it, make any small changes that are required and ship it off to the next market’s long-suffering editor.

Over the last year I have produced eight print-on-demand paperbacks, which all link up to my products on Amazon. On Smashwords there is provision for a link to where your ebooks are sold in print. Speaking of Smashwords and Amazon, last night I made a small correction to one of my books and uploaded the revised file to both sites. I don’t like spelling mistakes and typos in my books.

With four email accounts, two major sales platforms, multiple Twitter accounts, plus all the usual Facebook crap, I spend a lot of time checking e-mails to see if I’m following someone back. So I’m trying a free followback service. They do it once a month for free. If you pay money, they’ll do it more often. I never pay money. I can wait to follow you back.

It was taking three or four seconds to delete an email, and up to forty-five seconds to open one up and read it. It was extremely frustrating, but this computer is just an old Pentium II and my internet is low-budget, i.e. not much bandwidth.

Now I have another pen name. In order to work his accounts, I have to sign out of my usual accounts. So I tend to work on him exclusively for a while and then go back to being me.

Right now the pen-name’s first novel is about ready, and the editing of that took x-number of man-hours.

Since New Year’s Day I have written fifteen or so new short stories. With rejections, that’s about twenty-five or thirty subs.

Normally I can produce the first draft of a novel in about two months. But all them shorts add up to probably well over sixty thousand words. One of them, at 17,000 words, stands alone just fine as a novella at a different price point. It represents another type of product.

It’s not that difficult to bundle up a dozen short stories and produce an ebook and a POD paperback. It’s another chance for the customer to find you. Stick that out on all those different retail platforms, right?

I still have ‘Core Values’ and ‘Selected Poems,’ to do yet from my alleged backlist, but formatting the poems would be a quick job. The cover image is adequate just the way it is.

A writer should never run out of words. You can talk, can’t you?

If I keep going, I’ll have another nice little blog post, later on I’ll check pen-name’s emails and follow back a few people for him so as to build up an audience as quickly as possible. The little bugger has given away ten copies of his novella on Smashwords for Ebook Week. I’ve only given away three copies of ‘The Assassins,’ so I have to admit I’m a little jealous, but he’s a good kid, and I’m glad I created him. If he can sell books better than me, boo-hoo.

So far his name has been withheld. It’s an experiment.

Other than that, the key to good time management is just to keep busy, right?

Every day, and in every way—

We just keep getting better and better.

And if you run out of things to do you can look for a bargain in Russian Brides.

(As long as she’s willing to pay her own way, there shouldn’t be a problem. - ed .)