Promo Work, Sequels, and Sanity Checks

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I feel a bit like Emerson lately. Squinting at the sun because I’ve been chained to my desk so much.

I’ve been so busy with promo work, you might have noticed I missed last week’s blog post. It was Monday afternoon when I noticed the lack of a post (because I hadn’t written one), so I figured the contest post would have to sustain you two weeks.

So here’s what’s been going on here.

Reagan, our 9 years old golden, has been recovering from a massive sinus infection that thank goodness wasn’t cancer.

My uncle had major spine surgery that involved fusion and rods last week.

The second draft of Six Train’s sequel is done and in the hands of beta readers.

I took a week to focus solely on promo stuff, during which I pounded out 8 guest blog posts, worked on an essay, paid for ad space and weighed in on ad designs for TGWIG, scheduled a library workshop, booked the venue for a cocktail party for the book (September 17th at Bin 300 in Wolcott), and finalized the script for the book trailer.

I have a brand new workshop I had to create for October. I spent several weeks in May drafting and fine tuning that. I also created podcasts to go with it. Laying down those three 3 minute tracks took hours.

Then last week, I started my summer writing project: the sequel to TGWIG. I had a 3 page outline I did in March. With Six Train’s sequel, I wrote a 90 page outline that took forever and then I didn’t really follow it because as I got into the story it didn’t feel right.

So on this sequel, I went back to what I did for the first book in a series–a short 3 page synopsis. I’m on tight deadlines because of Six Train’s sequel, so I have 3 months to lay down a first draft of TGWIG’s sequel and clean it up. That means I’m drafting 2000 words (10 pages) every day for a while. So far I’ve got 10k words on the page.

I’m finding the easiest way to face that word count is to go back over yesterday’s pages and start adding to the word count. Then when I get to the blank page, I’m in the flow of the story and I’m ready to go. It takes me 2-3 hours to knock out that word count.

Then it’s back to promo stuff. I set up three ads on Goodreads to start running. I’m working on another workshop for the library event in August.

And I’m gearing up to start offering school visits this year. Which means I have to figure out what I will charge and how to get the word out to schools and fine tune my workshops for teens.

Yes, it’s going to be a very busy summer!

There are some amazing entries to the Tell Me Your Ghost Story contest. I am so impressed by your writing skills. This is going to be a hard contest to judge! Thanks to everyone who has entered. We’ve got one month left on the contest, so make sure you get your entry in before July 15th at 11 p.m. EST!

On the good news front, The Girl Who Ignored Ghosts has some really awesome reviews coming in on Goodreads!

If you plan to order TGWIG from Amazon, please preorder it–it really helps jump my author ranking on the release day and will help my book hit the Amazon bestseller list!

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29 Responses to Promo Work, Sequels, and Sanity Checks

  1. Pingback: Summer Reading Giveaway | Sheila Hurst

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