#IWSG post - What steps have you taken or plan to take to put a schedule in place for your writing and publishing?

Happy New Year and welcome to the first IWSG posting for 2018! Here we encourage each other monthly on our writing journey.

The brainchild of Alex J Cavanaugh, his awesome co-hosts for the January 3 posting of the IWSG are Tyrean Martinson, Ellen @ The Cynical Sailor, Megan Morgan, Jennifer Lane, and Rachna Chhabria! Please visit if you can.

Today I'm going to answer the set question:

January 3 question - What steps have you taken or plan to take to put a schedule in place for your writing and publishing?

I apologize in advance if this is a bit garbled. I had a very small window to get this done...

My writing schedule is pretty awesome at the best of times, and woeful at the worst of times.  Soon the Christmas holidays will be over -- for me the end of this week -- so I can begin my routine of heading to my office (called Den's Den) early in the morning when I'm at the beach and going early to the State Library on teaching days when I'm in Brisbane. Usually this gets me up to 4 - 6 hours a day at the laptop.

But it's not just about the writing, is it? I also have to factor in sending my work to beta readers, editing, paying an editor, rewriting, attending meetings with my critters and sending them chapters routinely to be discussed together. I'm never going to be one of those writers who write a book a month. How do you do that if you edit/rewrite? Please do tell. 

And then there's the reciprocal critiques I do for other writers. 

This year I need to factor into my schedule more book reviews of blogger books.

I'm planning to de-list my vampire novel on Amazon and republish in its new-beaut version through Draft2Digital who now have Amazon on their list of distributors, too!! My critters have been too busy over Christmas to re-read, but I have it with one beta reader who has already made suggestions, good ones.

• So, my Paris romance (75,000+ words) is still with Avon and Tule. Waiting to hear.
• It seems to be generally accepted that you need to self-publish more than one novel or it's not worthwhile, so I'm also working on getting the next vampire novel in the series finished and at least Chapter One on the third before I publish. We'll see.
• I've decided to go with a pen name for my vamp trilogy. I checked out the top-selling vampire novels on Amazon and the authors have very apt names. I started a thread in the facebook group I mention below and got 250 useful comments on the ways and means of pen names. So that means an author page on facebook, and a newsletter I guess, (jury's out on this one), all to garner interest before I self-publish.

I've been haunting the 20Booksto50K Facebook group which is a boon to see what successful authors are doing re self-publishing and marketing. A great place to lurk and learn. Can't sing their praises highly enough.

So, I won't hold you up. You can see I have a plan for 2018. You need to head to more posts for the IWSG. Go HERE for the list...

And over at WEP we have announced the winners for those who wrote for us in December. Please visit and congratulate them if you can. Also check out the awesome challenges for 2018! 

Now I'm looking forward to hearing all about your writing goals for 2018!

And please, if you have a newsletter, would you answer the following:

• who did you choose to go with? 
• how did you grow your reader base?
• how often do you send out your newsletter?
• er, do you actually recommend a newsletter? I know heavyweights like Anne R Allen say it's old hat, but that's not what I'm hearing elsewhere.

Thanks a mille!!