But I just hit publish on a new story and can’t quite bring myself to sink into writing mode just yet.  Which makes me think about all the non-writing activities that go into being self-published.

I put my non-fiction titles out in print this month.  Six of them.  (One for M.H. Lee – You Can Survive This – which means I will probably never be traditionally published under this name….)  I added it up and doing so took me about thirty hours of work between creating the templates, creating the covers, reading each book when I received the proof, updating the ebook and paperback files with my edits, and finally hitting publish.

For me thirty hours of work is probably fifty thousand words or more of writing.

But that’s what you have to do when you self-publish.  You have to juggle a lot.

Of course, I actually find it fun to create covers.  I won’t win awards for my covers anytime soon, but it can be a nice break from writing that still feels productive.

And I can’t tell you how frickin’ cool it feels to hold a physical copy of something you wrote in your hands.  (I’ve probably already told you that a few times by now.  That’s how cool it feels.)

One of the interesting things about throwing myself into this writing thing full-time is that I’m never off.  I never take a day anymore where I don’t do something writing-related.  Some days I don’t write, like yesterday.  But I still do something writing-related.  Like publish my final two paperbacks and then go wide with four new titles that have rolled out of KU.

Honestly, I don’t know how people who have lives do this….

Anyway.  More bookmarked blog posts next week.  Figured I’d just ramble at you today.  (And hopefully I did it long enough that Amazon has posted the January KU borrow rate by now and I can have a final number for January sales and then turn back to writing.  It won’t be a pretty number, but still a better number than any month other than December.)