Publishing Challenge! Chapter 5

Image by Gino Crescoli from Pixabay

See Chapter 4 here

Chapter 5

Publication Day!
Today sees the publication of another Wordsworth Short.

Martha’s Favourite Doll is a short story that one fiction editor asked me to rewrite and then rejected anyway. So I published it myself in Twee Tales Twee, and now it’s available as a standalone. One day in the future, it will be added to another collection.

You can find all of my books on the BUY MY BOOKS tab on the blog, or you can go to www.books2read.com/DianeWordsworth. One day I’ll work out how to add links to the galleries in the side bar of the blog…

Jury service
On Thursday morning last week, I received my first ever jury service summons. It’s in only a few weeks, so I had to rejig the diary and bring forward the prep work for the two books that will be published on those two Mondays.

I was going to contact the publications on Medium to ask about removing my short stories, at least temporarily while I publish them as standalones or part of a collection on Amazon.

I know they’re my stories and that Amazon usually give in after I’ve jumped through some of their hoops, but it also puts more pressure on the guys at Draft2Digital, and I think it might be easier all round if I just ‘delist’ the stories that are online at least while they’re republished.

Publishing schedule
With me moving other work forward now that was due to be done during the jury service fortnight, I don’t really have time to dedicate to having online stories delisted at the moment. So I changed the publishing schedule instead. But it also impacts on books that were due to be published beforehand as well.

  • Therefore, Pancake Race, which was originally scheduled to be published on Monday 14 February, will now be Alexandra’s Ragtag Band.
  • I was going to write a new story to be published on Monday 7 March, but now I’m publishing Going, Going, Gone.
  • Monday 14 March was also going to be a new story, but I’m going to bring Arriverderci Roma forward instead.

My next job, then, was the covers for the two new books. I wasn’t intending on publishing any of them for a good few months yet, so I didn’t even have images lined up.

Project Management for Writers: Gate 2
I was due to start writing Project Management for Writers: Gate 2 on Monday 7 February, as it’s scheduled for publication on Monday 28 March. The work has been brought forward a week now, starting today.

Instead of starting with writing Chapter 1, though, I’m going to start with the duplicate material from Book 1. That’s the introduction, an explanation of the different Gates, and the end matter. Then I’ll start Chapter 1 on Thursday.

Covers
It took me a while to find suitable pictures for four books, but I got there in the end. I already had one for Arriverderci Roma. It was the other two (Alexandra’s Ragtag Band and Going, Going, Gone) plus another two (The Last Invasion of Britain and It Wasn’t Me) I needed to sort out.

Then I removed the books I’m not publishing yet from the sidebar on the blog, and I added in the new ones. This job took longer than usual because there were more of them. Usually it’s one job once a week, and I can usually prep the story and make the cover in half an hour.

The job also took longer than usual because there was a glitch in the WordPress gallery drag n drop feature that’s clashed with the latest update. This meant I couldn’t put them in the right order and had to delete all those not yet published and add those due to be published in the next few weeks.

The glitch is apparently being resolved in the next WP update.

When I went in to add the latest books to my shelf at books2read.com, I noticed that the new cover for Twee Tales is already showing. The other two still have their old covers, but I won’t have time to go in and change the credits in the interiors until after my jury service.

Before I change the interiors, I have to sort out those online stories or just go for it and risk Amazon throwing their toys out again. I’ll weigh up the pros and cons and decide then.

Over to you…

Do you have any questions? How is your publishing challenge going?

Publishing Challenge: out in 2023