This is a post for the Do You Have Goals/The Five Year Project blog hop.
My goal for the purposes of this blog hop is ‘finish and publish a novel or two.’ One of the things I’ve been doing to meet my goal is that I’ve been reading up on self-publishing. Most recently I’ve read Write. Publish. Repeat. and one thing that caught my attention was the focus on self-publishing as a business.
I think I’ve begun to think of it like farming. The farmer plants crops, tends them, and then sells them. When I write I am planting my crop. Revisions/proofreading means I am tending the crop. When the crop has matured I am ready to put it up for sale.
A moody farmer who plants only when his farming ‘muse’ inspires him would not be able to produce enough product consistently to create a survivable income. In the same way, if I write only when I feel inspired and artistic, I will not produce enough product to have much of a writing career.
At this point, the main ‘product’ I have is my poetry, which I’ve been writing since 1988. I have self-published a little, but since I was print-only and had no e-book version, it didn’t sell well.
Today I’ve been working on a poetry ‘chapbook’— twenty-four poems to be published as a free e-book, and perhaps as a cheap printed booklet if I can work that out. The chapbook is called surly petunia, which is the title of a poem in the collection.
Using Scrivener, I’ve ‘compiled’ surly petunia as an e-book. This is only a ‘first draft’ and I have a few things to correct. But I should be able to have it published as an e-book in about a week.
Other projects in the pipeline are a revised, expanded edition of my first full-length poetry book, ‘Where the Opium Cactus Grows’. A second poetry volume, ‘Waiting for the Poison Shot’, is also planned. And there is a science fiction serialized story in 9 parts I’m working on.
Right now I’m feeling good about these projects. They seem pretty doable. Check back next month to see how far I’ve come.
Read some poems: https://myantimatterlife.wordpress.com/category/writing/poetry/
Join my e-mail list: http://eepurl.com/FN2hr
My Antimatter Life 