Incomplete (self-publishing) projects will haunt and distract you from anything else you want to start.
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| (Photo credit: unknown...) |
This includes small projects as well as (and very definitely) any big projects.
If you look up Napoleon Hill, or his millionaire progeny James Breckenridge Jones, you'll find that there is one thing we all have in common.
"Multi-tasking" is a myth. We only really focus on one thing at a time.
Since we are just, each one of us, a single individual - your solution is to either pay someone else to do stuff for you, or streamline what you are doing to just a single activity at a time.
This was my recent "Feedbooks" post. I had these set up in tabs on my browser for days, just so I could find the time to put it into a blog post for you.
I was reminded today, when walking my pastures checking cows and fences, that any planning I was doing had to take into account the realities of earning income. And my income comes from finding/creating more books to publish and then publishing them.
My most recent project, months (years, actually) in the making, left me with a huge batch of 100 books. I'd only finished publishing them to Google Play/Books, and partially to Kobo when another inspiration hit. Published there mainly because their interfaces are the simplest. I'd done a test with those I thought would make it through Amazon, but this was only 30 books. (No PLR, no simply edited-and-republished-as-is public domain.) Lessons learned.
I did get inspired to create a new project, with a book on Peace which would help people adopt a "peace mindset" - it is to have 30 lessons, which come from almost as many authors, which leads me to publish almost as many books by those authors. Most all of these will be collections for Amazon.
An intense amount of work, even for me.
But I really, really, have to get back to publishing that earlier project to iTunes and Nook (as well as finishing up Kobo.)
One thing that reminded me of this was getting my bank statement. I opened it up to see what deposits I'd gotten this month and found I'd spent more on creating books and running this business than I had made.
Amazon was missing - which is currently four to five times what I make from other distributors.
Chasing this down found that they deposited on the 28th of February, meaning it hadn't cleared the banking system in time to show up in the account. (This means March will be a "double-dip".)
The moral: if you don't keep track of your bottom line, you soon won't have a bottom line to track.
That goes further: start looking for a J.O.B. (Flinch, shudder, swallow hard.)
And sharing this with you.
Again: Keep an eye on your income metrics as a self-publishing author, or as an Indie SOHO publisher.
Monthly, at least.
And realize increasing your income will be the result of doing more of what created that income - adding more value to other people's lives.
So finish what you've started. Leverage everything you can, always.
And may you flourish independently of those who subscribe to the doom-and-gloom that it's all impossible (note: they all have J.O.B.'s, some of which depend on spreading that same pessimistic mantra...)
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