2014 Writing and Publishing Plans

2013 Review

Coming Soon! by Paul Downey | Flickr

Due to a certain wedding and honeymoon, I got a little behind on The Ageless, my post-apocalyptic novel with fantasy elements. But my writing is back on track now.

I’d planned to jump back to 4 sessions a week after the wedding, but I’ve actually been fitting in 5 writing sessions a week!

As for 2013 word counts, since most of the year was review and revisions, I only wrote about 50,000 words. That doesn’t count a lot of in-line revisions, but it does count entire scene rewrites (e.g. if switching POV).

You can follow along with my progress on my writing calendar.

I finished my review of The Ageless, and am deep into rewrites. I had hoped to finish them by February, but now it looks like it’ll be closer to the end of February or mid to late March.

I also clarified how I plan to publish The Ageless, The Century, and my unknown future projects.

In December 2013, I completed a business plan based on an episode of the Rocking Self-Publishing podcast. I think it’ll help make my goals clearer in times of uncertainty.

Now, let’s talk about 2014.

2014 Writing and Publishing Goals

In order to better predict when I’ll be ready to publish The Ageless and The Century, I started used a Gantt chart in Google Drive. It’s really helped illuminate how unrealistically optimistic I was being about my publishing dates.

For instance, I thought that I’d be able to publish The Ageless in late 2014. But finding a cover designer, developmental editor, copy editor, proofreader, and formatter will take time, working with them will take time, and putting it all together will take time. Which I’d not fully considered. With a Gantt chart, you can really see how dependent upon one another all these tasks are.

I’m now focusing on the following goals:

• Complete Pass 1 and Pass 2 revisions to The Ageless and hand it off to beta readers by late February to late March
• Finish incorporating feedback from alpha and beta readers and submit to my future developmental editor by mid June
• Finish incorporating feedback from my editor and submit to my future copy editor by mid August
• Finish incorporating copy edits and submit to my future proofreader by mid September
• Submit concept ideas to my future cover designer by mid September
• Review proofreader’s changes and submit to my future interior formatter by mid October
• Receive first draft and send feedback of cover by mid October
• Compare and choose final cover by early November
• Give cover designer final page count for spine width, give formatter digital cover for ebook, other administrative stuff, upload to Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Smashwords, CreateSpace, etc.
• Release around the first of the year, 2015.

Non-Writing Goals

Let’s Talk

Are you planning to publish a book in 2014? If you have any suggestions for good SFF editors or cover designers, please let me know.

If you’re interested in beta reading any of my novels, contact me by sending me a private post on Google+ at +Traci Loudin.

If you sign up for my new releases newsletter, you’ll be the first to know when I publish The Ageless.