Tag: Elizabeth Javor

elizabeth speaks, in your corner, Uncategorized

In Your Corner : Summer Goals (Pt 4)

Three weeks ago, we started our summer goals blog series by laying out our writing goals–or at least, by talking about a few of my own.  And with the understanding that every author lives a very different life and faces very different challenges from the next–an therefore my goals should not necessarily be taken as anyone else’s without first affirming they make sense to that author’s circumstances–I listed them:

  1. Write, and
  2. Structure my writing … loosely.

(These goals make much more sense in context, I promise.)  And two weeks ago, we discussed energy and energy budgets, looking into how we wake up each moment with a finite amount of the stuff and have to use it and conserve it much as we do other finite resources.  I made an argument that we ought to take care of our bodies as much as we do our work and our minds–and that all three of these are actually part of the same struggle.  This argument that bled through to last week’s post, in which we concluded that if we don’t keep our bodies healthy, our writing will suffer.

Which brings me to today’s topic:

What to Do When You Achieve Your Goals

 

First of all, congratulations!  Meeting your goals is a big deal!  Secondly, we have to pose the question: what next?  This is the hardest part of the authorial process, coming up with a plan for your next step.

achieving goals

It’s easy to get lost here, in the in-between, because it’s just so easy to enjoy the afterglow, the freedom to binge on Netflix and Masterpiece Theatre.  It’s easy to allow the well-deserved relaxation period to last just a little too … long.

If I have one recommendation for what needs to happen next once you’ve achieved your goals, it’s that you be proactive.  Don’t surrender to inertia.  Watch the clock, and time your “down” period (or periods, as may be).  Draw up lists.  Weigh the options: is it time to write a sequel?  Or should you start with a new original idea?

Don’t kick yourself if you’ve reached a point of burnout, either.  Being an author isn’t all about writing books, in the end, and there are plenty of things you can do–as an author!–that don’t involve writing.  If you are looking for a break or a change of pace, consider switching gears and spending some weeks or months focusing exclusively on perfecting the aesthetics of your book–and of course, on marketing it.  It’s worth blocking out a few days on your yearly calendar for this sort of thing anyway, but it fits beautifully as a next step after you’ve reached your writing goals.

Set up some book readings and signings at your local indie bookstores and libraries.  Network with your fellow authors and other industry professionals who can help you further along the path to self-publishing success.  Attend a conference.  Keep writing fun by keeping all of your options open–and by choosing the ones that help you define and redefine your own goals.  It’s okay for the “next step” to be a bit messy and vague, for a while–as long as you find your forward momentum.

It’s never wasted time if you consider all of your actions a part of one single whole!

You are not alone. ♣︎

ElizabethABOUT ELIZABETH JAVOR: With over 18 years of experience in sales and management, Elizabeth Javor works as the Manager of Author Services for Outskirts Press. The Author Services Department is composed of knowledgeable publishing consultants, pre-production specialists, customer service reps and book marketing specialists; together, they all focus on educating authors on the self-publishing process to help them publish the book of their dreams. Whether you are a professional looking to take your career to the next level with platform-driven non-fiction or a novelist seeking fame, fortune, and/or personal fulfillment, Elizabeth Javor can put you on the right path.
elizabeth speaks, in your corner, Uncategorized, Writing

In Your Corner : Summer Goals (Pt 3)

Two weeks ago, I started my blog series on summer goals by talking about writing goals–or at least, by talking about a few of mine.  And while I think it’s important not to slavishly apply another author’s goals to your life without first taking into account the very important fact that you probably live very different lives and face very different challenges.  Which is why, in the end, the goals I shared were both few and fairly general:

  1. Write, and
  2. Structure my writing … loosely.

Anything more specific would automatically render my goals into something else: A how-to guide for success at writing that assumes every author shares the same background and experiences, the same struggles and schedule…and the same lifestyle.

This last point provided a segwey into the second post in this series.  Last week, I talked about energy and energy budgets–how we wake up each moment with a finite amount of the stuff and have to use it and conserve it much as we do other finite resources.  That is, with care and restraint, with an eye for treating our bodies well.

Which brings me to today’s topic:

A Writer’s Lifestyle

And look, this is dangerous territory as well.  I couldn’t possibly project my own lifestyle onto yours without recognizing that A) you’re a very different human being, that B) I am not exactly anywhere near perfect myself, and that C) there are a million different ways to live healthy lives, and claiming any one of those ways is the *BEST* or *THE ONLY* way is in fact a complete and utter lie.  A tabloid-worthy lie.

Bear with me a moment:

Let’s consider for a second what might happen if we try to be authors out of the context of our bodies–if we, like Plato and many of the Ancient Greeks, divorce the workings of the human mind and the human body.  We can try to perfect each of these things separately from the other, but our minds and our bodies make up parts of a whole–and neuroscience is constantly revealing just how interconnected the mind’s activities and the brain’s physical structure are, and if we place work of an author within the realm of the mind then we must also recognize that it is affected by the physical structures of the brain, which are in turn affected by the other physical structures of the body.

Conclusion: If we don’t keep our bodies healthy, our writing will suffer.

Common sense, right?  Healthy body >> healthy brain >> healthy mind >> healthy work.

lifestyle

The real struggle is how to get there, and how to sift through the tabloids and the magazines and the blogs and the Pinterest boards and the well-intentioned advice we’re constantly stumbling into.  And as a woman, I also have to recognize that it’s easy to confuse “beauty standards” advice with “health and wellness” advice.  But those two things are not the same.  Attaining 18-inch waist isn’t the same thing as eating right and eating food that feeds the brain, for example.  But low-impact activity three to five times a week–say, walking down to the park or mowing the lawn–is a great way to stimulate brain and body alike.  Anything that gets your heart rate up, gets you breathing, and breaks up the monotony of sitting at home.

Three things show up as common threads to every respectable writer’s advice column when it comes to lifestyle:

  • eating well
  • sleeping well
  • getting out and about

If any one of these components presents a challenge for you, it may be time to try something new.  Play around with integrating more protein-rich foods into your diet, like avocado and pinto beans.  Move things around in your schedule for a week or two to try out some new sleep hygiene habits or some new activities out and around the neighborhood.  Nothing dramatic–nothing drastic–just a little short-term experiment.  You’ll find out pretty quickly if one of these changes is sustainable and makes a difference to your writing.  I promise!

You are not alone. ♣︎

ElizabethABOUT ELIZABETH JAVOR: With over 18 years of experience in sales and management, Elizabeth Javor works as the Manager of Author Services for Outskirts Press. The Author Services Department is composed of knowledgeable publishing consultants, pre-production specialists, customer service reps and book marketing specialists; together, they all focus on educating authors on the self-publishing process to help them publish the book of their dreams. Whether you are a professional looking to take your career to the next level with platform-driven non-fiction or a novelist seeking fame, fortune, and/or personal fulfillment, Elizabeth Javor can put you on the right path.
elizabeth speaks, Goals, in your corner, Uncategorized, Writing

In Your Corner : Summer Goals (Pt 2)

A Question of Energy

Last week, I started this blog series on summer goals by revealing mine (to write, and to structure my writing … loosely at least).  Everyone has different needs and goals in the summer, however, because every author’s life looks radically different from the next person’s.  One thing remains constant, however:

It takes energy to write.

And in the summertime, that energy is a complicated thing to channel.  On the one hand, the days are longer.  More daylight means more time to write (or the illusion of more time) because there are more hours in the day to take care of the basic what-have-yous of summer life, including mowing the lawn and going for an evening ramble through the neighborhood.  More time outside in that daylight equates to more Vitamin D (or so my family doctor tells me), and more Vitamin D means an uptick in mood and–you guessed it–energy!

welding energy

So far, so good.

But there’s trouble in paradise.  (There always is.  Ask John Milton.)  Just because we have more energy and (the illusion of) more time in summer, we also have an increase in demands.  You heard me: the myth of a languid summer is one we absorb from a literary canon in which people go for long vacations, long walks on the beach, languid soaks in the hot tub, or whatever else they can dream up.  The problem with this is: most of us have to work.  The world looked a little different when we were still in school (and when resumes for college didn’t mandate packing our high school schedules with summer programs), and the world still looks rather different for people of means.  But the fact of the matter is, most self-publishing authors aren’t middle schoolers or millionaires.

Statistically speaking, most self-publishing authors (that we know of, at least) are of an age and demographic that they both work and have families to wrangle.  And while jobs are as diverse as the people who work them, I can safely say that my own job is busiest in summer–by far.  And with school out for the summer, wrangling kids to and from various social activities, sporting events, and so forth occupies a lot of my (supposedly languorous) time.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this:

Protect Your Time. Treat Energy as a Finite, Precious Resource.

What does your energy budget look like?  When are you at your absolute best?  That’s the time you want to set aside to write.  For me, it’s the early morning hours.  Now, I know my basic instinct is to try and knock out everything on my to-do list first thing as soon as I wake up, to leave “more time for things I love later,” but the problems with this theory are that–

  1. the to-do list never ends;
  2. I burn myself out by midday; and
  3. I never feel like starting something new at the end of the day, when everything is quiet at last.

If I’m not careful, my best hours are over and gone before I know it.  Even worse, if I start prioritizing a to-do list instead of my writing, I end up being not much of a writer.  Luckily, my family understands this and they want to support me in my writing, so every evening as we negotiate the details for the next day, we make sure to set aside a little time first thing in the morning for me to do the thing I love–so that I can better be the person they love (and let’s face it, be a more happy and loving person in general).  I also have to remember that sleeping and eating well are vital components to feeling well and retaining energy throughout the day.  I know we all feel the pull towards strong coffee and starch after the lunch hour when our blood sugar is crashing–but I’m here to tell you we can do better, together.  More on that later!

You are not alone. ♣︎

ElizabethABOUT ELIZABETH JAVOR: With over 18 years of experience in sales and management, Elizabeth Javor works as the Manager of Author Services for Outskirts Press. The Author Services Department is composed of knowledgeable publishing consultants, pre-production specialists, customer service reps and book marketing specialists; together, they all focus on educating authors on the self-publishing process to help them publish the book of their dreams. Whether you are a professional looking to take your career to the next level with platform-driven non-fiction or a novelist seeking fame, fortune, and/or personal fulfillment, Elizabeth Javor can put you on the right path.
elizabeth speaks, Goals, in your corner, Uncategorized

In Your Corner : Summer Goals (Pt 1)

Summer is a time for kicking back, for putting your feet up, for drinking that sweet ice tea, and for avoiding responsibilities.  But it’s also an opportunity to knock out some of those projects which you can’t tackle at any other time of year.  The long daylight hours, the relaxed atmosphere, and the constant barrage of creative inspiration both on- and offline make for a potent mix–one you should take advantage of, albeit while still giving yourself the time and space to recover from another frenetic year, another long winter.

This is why I love goals.  Goals keep ups focused, and on point, and help us prioritize.  Without goals, everything hits us all at once: every responsibility, every task, every responsibility.  But with a well-defined goal or two, we know exactly what the core of our mission for the month or week or day is, and everything else–well, everything else, we can forgive or forget or allow ourselves to do “just enough.”  It’s really important not to be a perfectionist in everything, if your goal is to relax and still be productive.

goals

So, goals!  What should they be?  Of course, you’re the only one who can and should decide upon your own goals.  In lieu of telling you what yours should or could be, here are mine:

Write.

Summer is a deceptive time.  I say “deceptive” because while it is in fact true that it tends to be a calm, rich, slow time of year … it is also busy.  So very busy.  Especially if you have a family, enjoy sports, and also have to go to work every day.  There are car rides to manage, kids to keep tabs on, meals to prepare as always–and the list goes on.  Because I’m the sort of person whose first instinct is to knock out all of these necessities first and put everything else on hold until they’re all done, I often find myself approaching the end of the day having done no writing at all … and exhausted.  I never do my best writing in the afternoon, much less the evening.  So my personal goal is to write, to write every day (even if it’s just a short paragraph), and to write first thing in the morning after I wake up.  Quantity doesn’t matter so much, as long as I’m constantly generating new material, and carving out a set time in the day when I’m at my best is a decision I have to make–or else it will never happen.

Structure my Writing … Loosely.

There are a lot of ways to do this, and I use several of them myself.  I have heard of several authors who leave off every writing session mid-sentence, just so that when they come back to that page they are forced to finish a thought before beginning a new paragraph or page–and they often say that this is somehow less daunting than facing that proverbial blank page at the beginning of every writing session.  I’ve tried this, and it works!  Or at least I should say: It works for me.  I recommend giving it an attempt, just to see if it works for you.

Another idea to try is the prompt.  I’ll write more about this next week, but don’t underestimate the creative potential to a writing prompt!  I love them because–if I find just the right one–the hard work of coming up with a place to start is already taken care of.  All I have to do is respond.  And on some busy mornings (and afternoons and evenings) that’s all I can muster: response.  They are the first and most consistently reliable way of conquering the dreaded Writer’s Block in my little world of constant struggle.

***

Look, it’s not important that you adopt any specific one of my own personal goals.  If I’ve learned anything over my years of dealing with the writing process, it’s that every writer has to take ownership of it before it feels right.  Before it feels authentic.  But I think the core message holds true: Summer is a natural time for writing goals, every bit as much as it’s a time for hitting the beach or the trails.  Writing is never easy in this frenetically busy world, and that’s okay.  Goals help us move forward, despite everything.

You are not alone. ♣︎

ElizabethABOUT ELIZABETH JAVOR: With over 18 years of experience in sales and management, Elizabeth Javor works as the Manager of Author Services for Outskirts Press. The Author Services Department is composed of knowledgeable publishing consultants, pre-production specialists, customer service reps and book marketing specialists; together, they all focus on educating authors on the self-publishing process to help them publish the book of their dreams. Whether you are a professional looking to take your career to the next level with platform-driven non-fiction or a novelist seeking fame, fortune, and/or personal fulfillment, Elizabeth Javor can put you on the right path.
elizabeth speaks, in your corner, Uncategorized

In Your Corner : Why Pampering Yourself (& Your Book) Isn’t Such a Bad Thing

When I say “pamper,” I’m guessing one or two images immediately pops into your mind. Luxury in today’s world means manicures and pedicures, gourmet meals, superyachts, and never having to wait in line at the DMV.  Most importantly, perhaps, it is seen as something unattainable by all save a select few who hit the genetic lottery or who are otherwise incredibly lucky.  But most people don’t get to live this life.  Most people aren’t millionaires.  To most people, self-publishing authors included, life is a constant series of negotiations between risk and reward, where “success” equates to keeping one’s head above water a little while longer, and “failure” means losing the house.  Luxury and pampering is saved for special life events, like honeymoons and year-end vacations, only to illustrate even more clearly how impossible it is to attain these things easily and sustainably.

All this is true. But it shouldn’t stop you, a self-publishing author, from receiving the best services available in the design, formatting, and publication of your book.
manicure pedicuregourmet meal

I’m talking about premium options.  And while it’s easy to see why some of these options, like cover enhancement on your book’s Amazon listing, are desirable.  But it’s harder to see, I’d guess, why it’s worth pampering yourself with these options when they’re a kind of luxury.  You can publish your book without them.  So why pay for something you don’t strictly need?  It’s the same old risk vs reward balancing act I mention, above, isn’t it?

I happen to think that certain luxuries are not just attainable for the common author but are revolutionary to that author’s marketing and sales experience.  The problem with premium options on Amazon is that they truly are a kind of pampering–in that they’re not something the common author can do by him or herself.  They take special access to the Amazon publication system, special design skills, and a killer instinct for the constraints of the form.  Basically, the financial obstacles may be easily overcome and the social ones too, but there remains an expertise gap to cross.

Which is why I strongly recommend paying, just this once, for that little luxury–a payment that recoups enormous dividends in the self-publishing author’s sales figures.  If you’re wondering about the specifics, premium options on Amazon allow readers to see your book featured in a larger and more eye-catching setup in their keyword search results, to see inside your book and read some front-page material in a preview … and to see your book cover right away, rather than waiting the four weeks or so that it ordinarily takes the images to be processed.  These are not small advantages–they are the make-or-break features that often determine whether a new reader clicks their way into learning more about your book and, of course, buying it!

BEFORE
AFTER

The tweaks may be small, but the effects are huge.  They’re at least worth researching, and given my background at Outskirts Press I of course recommend starting with reading up on the enhancement options they offer there.  But no matter who you choose, keep your eyes and ears open to new ideas and new opportunities to “pamper” yourself.  You’re worth it.  Your book is worth it.  You deserve the best!

You are not alone. ♣︎

ElizabethABOUT ELIZABETH JAVOR: With over 18 years of experience in sales and management, Elizabeth Javor works as the Manager of Author Services for Outskirts Press. The Author Services Department is composed of knowledgeable publishing consultants, pre-production specialists, customer service reps and book marketing specialists; together, they all focus on educating authors on the self-publishing process to help them publish the book of their dreams. Whether you are a professional looking to take your career to the next level with platform-driven non-fiction or a novelist seeking fame, fortune, and/or personal fulfillment, Elizabeth Javor can put you on the right path.