Publishing Challenge!

Image by Gino Crescoli from Pixabay

Welcome to 2022! And welcome to my challenge for the coming year.

The publishing challenge blog post is supposed to be on a Monday, to coincide with my own publishing schedule. However, as yesterday was a bank holiday, I wasn’t at work. So I’m doing this week’s publishing challenge post today.

See Chapter 1 here.

Chapter 2

I had to have a play around with the current publishing challenge schedule. This is because I was really, really busy with ghostwriting jobs and, of course, we had a Christmas holiday for the last two weeks of December.

Revised publication schedule on Excel

I transferred the dates for the first two months from the exercise book onto a spreadsheet.

This made it easier to move things around if, for example, a new piece of writing isn’t quite ready for the date I’d initially chosen to publish it.

In the spreadsheet image, I’ve already hit PUBLISH on those marked with a TICK. Those greyed out are the ones that have been published.

(Apart from One Born Every Minute, which has been greyed out since grabbing this screen image.)

Once I’d come up with a revised schedule, I was able to add them to my Asana project management, and then move on to the next stage.

The easy ones

The easier books to publish are those that are already written, and these are usually the short stories, or Wordsworth Shorts. All I have to do is open up my short story template and copy and paste the story in.

I do a very quick edit, as they’re usually edited and proof-read before I class them as ‘finished’, and I’ll add where they’ve been previously published, if applicable, including if the current book I’m publishing is an anthology.

For example, next Monday’s book is Flash Fiction: five very short stories (aka Flash Fiction 1). In here are five stories that are less than 1,200 words. These are too short to publish as standalone shorts. It’s not cost-effective, and many of the book distributors do not like them to be too short. So I put them all in a collection.

Of the stories in Flash Fiction 1:

  • one story was first published in Twee Tales Twee
  • one story was first published in Twee Tales Too, and it won first prize in a competition
  • one was first published in My Weekly, then it was published in Twee Tales Too
  • one hasn’t been published anywhere, so that one is listed as ‘first published in Flash Fiction 1
  • and one was previously broadcast on BBC Radio Deven, and it was published in Twee Tales

These stories were all already written, so all I had to do was use the Twee Tales template, update the ‘also by Diane Wordsworth page’, and off I went.

For the rest of my January schedule, The Mystery of Woolley Dam and The Ace of Cups are both already written, although The Ace of Cups needs a thorough edit. Both also already have their covers. So, apart from having to go through The Ace of Cups with a fine tooth-comb, these two are really easy.

The less-easy ones

Those books that are not as easy to publish are the ones that aren’t yet written.

In the current schedule, there are six books coming up that aren’t yet written:

  • Words Worth Reading: Issue 2 (collection)
  • Red Roses (short story)
  • The Fool (novella)
  • Project Management for Writers: Gate 2 (writers’ guide)
  • The Two of Wands (series instalment)
  • The Phoenix Lights (short story)

Therefore, individual following chapters will each cover: Words Worth Reading, short stories (including series instalments), novels and novellas, and non-fiction books.

Over to you…

What do you think of the cover?

Publishing Challenge: out in 2023

4 thoughts on “Publishing Challenge!

  1. It’s a great cover, love it. As ever you are so organised. My goal is to get Rod’s story published, sooner than later, but we’ll see. They’ve left Fair Isle now and are on their way to London, via Edinburgh.

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