It’s difficult, but it’s true.
As writers, we have to think a little differently.
Back in November, we had folks complaining about the Christmas sales starting before Thanksgiving. For normal folks and normal things, yeah, that might be a bit early.
As writers and publishers, if you’re getting your Christmas story to me in November, you’re late. I wanted it no later than September. Preferably, you’d have gotten it to me in July.
When I was working on my first book, someone told me, “take whatever you think is the reasonable time-line and double it.” Ten years later and I’ll tell you the rule isn’t set in stone. But it’s not far wrong!
Things take time
Unless you’re dumping prompts into ChatGPT and then dumping the results directly onto Amazon (Please don’t do that. And If you do, DON’T SEND IT TO ME!) writing is a process. Writing anything worth reading takes time.
There’s planning and organizing to do (at a minimum, you need to come up with an idea)
There’s writing the first draft.
You need a break between first draft and editing (at least a small one)
Then comes the editing. And trust me, you’ll want to run through it more than once…
At that point, things split.
If you’re submitting your work to a publisher, you have to:
- Figure out where you’re going to submit
- Format things correctly for the publisher/editor
- Submit the work
Then it’s the publisher’s turn. If we accept your work, we have to:
- Read and evaluate the piece
- Send you an offer.
- Get an acceptance back from you
- Have our people do the editing and design work.
- Send the work back to you for approval
- Do the final typesetting/setup work
And then we can publish the thing (hopefully on schedule).
If you self-publish, you need to do most of that yourself. Or you hire someone to do it. (Note: hopefully you’re willing to accept your own work and don’t delay too long in sending or accepting your own offer!)
It all takes time. Planning a head really helps. But then there are the things you can’t plan for.
Life happens
Just before I quit mental health (to work in publishing full time), I suddenly found myself in the hospital with a life-changing diagnosis.
A couple months ago, an electrical fault resulted in a driver’s side rear window failing. That resulted in my wife and I driving home (about 300 miles on the highway) with a tarp instead of a window.
And then, my wife’s team lead took a new job and left. It shook up the whole department.
Things we didn’t expect happen. By definition, you can’t plan for them. But you can plan some buffer time into your schedule.
If your time-line is really tight, any bump can throw you off. If you give yourself some room, you can adapt and work around the problem. (This is also why I enjoy having several projects going on at once. That power outage/street repair/shipping delay/(insert your own here) might delay one or two of the projects, but it rarely halts all of them!)
Give yourself some space and time. It helps.
It will pull together eventually
Writing is worth doing. Telling your story, getting out your message, is worth the effort. And there are things you can do to make yourself more successful.
One of the biggest is planning and giving yourself time for everything to come together. This post is going up on December 6, that’s too late to get a Christmas story to a publisher for this year (unless you’re running it down to the office supply store to print a copy yourself…), but you’ve got the time to do another edit or two and get it in for next year.
It will come together (if it’s worthy, it will). Just give yourself and your team the time to get it done.
Either way, I’ll see you next post.
