Steampunk Fairy Tales: Volume 3 now available!

Read about it »

How DIY Should You Go?

In my last sprint article, I mentioned having multiple projects is demotivating because each project competes for your time. Whether you’re an indie author or traditionally published, writing a book is already many projects.

  1. outlining
  2. writing
  3. editing
  4. critiquing
  5. reading
  6. proofreading
  7. formatting
  8. making cover art
  9. publishing
  10. marketing
  11. promoting
  12. blogging
  13. building a website
  14. listening to podcasts
  15. networking

…and probably a few others I can’t recall right now.

You can pay people to do these, but the cost adds up. We did everything ourselves the first time around to figure out when we should hire someone else.

 

 

We love the print cover for Dream Eater’s Carnival, but I think it’s lacking for ebooks. We’re going to try something different for the next cover, only because learning those skills will help us with other projects in the future. But, if this doesn’t work out, we will hire an artist in the future.

The final rounds of editing Dream Eater’s Carnival was excruciating. We will continue writing and editing future books in parallel, but once that’s done, we’ll definitely hire an editor.

Formatting ebooks and print books takes time, but it’s not so bad. The hardest part was figuring it out for Dream Eater’s Carnival. Now that I know, it should go faster in the future.

Marketing and promoting is difficult. We haven’t tried too hard yet, since I’ve heard that it’s not worth the effort until you have a few published books. We’ve done a few promotions to get a feel for what services work and what doesn’t. This should get easier as we learn more, but I will consider paying for training in the future.

As I said in the end of our July 2015 sprint article, I originally needed a website—not a great website—and I’m working on a real design now. I already know how to build a website, so I wasn’t about to pay for someone else to do it. But, I wanted to learn what features I needed before I spent too much time on the UI.

The main reasons we finished writing Dream Eater’s Carnival and will finish Echo Chamber Heist is Leslie quit her full time job and we use a sprint approach for project management. We had to make time and find a way to manage that time properly.

Protect your free time. Focus on what you want to finish, not what you want to do.

 
Related Article

Sprint 8: Breaking into August; Reflecting on July
This past month, Leslie completed 100% of her tasks for three weeks in a row, and we ran out of pins to put tasks on the board. Read on
 
Random Articles

Japan Day 3: Thousands of Torii Gates
Most of day 3 was in the fox shrine, Fushimi Inari Taisha, where we hiked mountain paths dotted with thousands of vermilion torii gates. Afterwards, we visited the zen gardens at Tofukuji. To rest, we took a dip in a public bath, where I intentionally got zapped with electricity. Read on

 


Comet, the Neighborhood Pig
I was drafting our Sprint 5 article and realized I had a lot to say about the things we did in April. One of our goals is to have more fun, but I didn’t want to overwhelm that article with pictures. In this article, Leslie bought me the greatest shirt ever made and we met the neighborhood pig. Read on