I'm an ARTISTE! Spreadsheets are for plebes!

Which of us hasn’t wanted to say that at some point? We’d like to spend most of our time on our ART, not on mechanics and logistics or *shudder* invoicing. But just as the reality of surfing is sand in unmentionable places and being bitten to hell by what you hope are just mosquitoes or sand fleas, the reality of writing is spending a ton of time on spreadsheets and schedules.

I am incredibly lazy when it comes to repetitive tasks. I will look for any possible alternative: automation, outsourcing, templates, or even avoidance. So, if it seems as if I’m going to have to do something annoying more than once, I’ll hack up a way to get organized and do it quickly. I’m sharing some of my hacks in case (a) they’re useful to you, and (b) you have better tips and tricks to help me.

1. You will write more than one book. Save it all in the Cloud.

When you’re writing your first book, you usually can’t see past it to what comes after. But for the vast majority of writers, it’s not their first book that gets picked up / becomes wildly successful. It’s usually the third or fourth. Or maybe you’re writing a series, so you know a sequel is coming. And publishers usually sign you up for a 2 or 3-book deal, so you might as well start thinking about how to organize all your stories.

Also, when you think you’re only writing one book, stray ideas feel compelling, because you don’t want to lose them. But they may not actually be part of this story. If you don’t have a way to collect these as they come—premises, new and interesting characters, fragments of conversation, or just a paragraph of text that hits you out of nowhere—they will spoil the book you’re currently working on.

I have separate Google Drive folders for every project, so any world-building, research, feedback, or stray character thoughts have a place to go where they can be triaged eventually. This also allows me to collect all final publication files (.epub, .pdf, cover images, etc.) for each book in that folder. I made the mistake of not asking my publisher for these for Driving by Starlight, and so I don’t have them at all. And I’m old enough that I’ve had the trauma of losing all the stuff I wrote because I hadn’t uploaded it to the Cloud. Never again.

2. You will write more than one VERSION of each book. Plan accordingly.

Sometimes you’ll edit in place. Sometimes you’ll need to do a full rewrite. If I’m doing a full rewrite, I start a new Scrivener file and copy over only the pieces I need as I need them. If I’m doing an edit in place (as I’m doing now for an upcoming book) I use labels to mark the versions and make notes about what changes were made / need to be made. Example: In an upcoming manuscript, Green marks a chapter / scene I am completely done with, Yellow marks a chapter where, the last time I read it, I made a minor edit (change to a single word/phrase, punctuation or formatting), and Red marks a major edit (sentence, paragraph or character name changed).

3. Launching a book requires an ever-adapting plan. Templatize early.

This is just a snapshot of my Book Launch template; the full trix goes up to Column P and has 30+ rows for some columns. There are plenty of great courses out there for anyone who’s interested in launching a book, so I’m not suggesting you use my planning template. The process changes as the industry shifts, so the plan will need to be kept up to date anyway. If you’re curious, the cells with a blue background are the ones a publisher will usually do for you. Everything else, you have to do yourself anyway, whether you’re self-published or traditionally published.

There are some funky cells in the above trix that say more about me than about the process, for instance that I dislike hyphenating words, but most book designers and publishers will go on a hyphenating spree because it’s the easiest way to get a double-justified page. Also that I showed up to my own book signing without a pen.

4. Rejections are valuable data. Organize and analyze them to grow your craft.

It can be tempting to “burn” all the rejections you receive and think about them as little as possible. But the nature of the rejection can tell you a lot about what is / isn’t working, and how you might want to tune your next set of submissions or your next novel. For instance, I learned from the “Send me the next” responses when the agent just didn’t resonate with this premise or this book didn’t fit their wishlist.

I further broke down the personalized rejections (the “I like it, but…” ones) to understand what was and wasn’t working, using a technique I learned from The Manuscript Academy, assigning positive points to the things agents called out as working, and negative points to what they called out as issues.

I find this tremendously helpful because it tells me that the premise and the writing are solid, but I need to work on making my stories easier to fall into from the first page.

5. Writing is EXPENSIVE. Track not just your costs, but your perceived value.

Let’s say you take a writing course, or a seminar about getting your book published, which costs you $500. But if you found an agent or made a direct connection with a publisher through it, you’re getting much more than $500 in value. Conversely, you may end up paying an editor or writing coach $2000 but could get the same value from an editor who only costs $500. These things are hit-or-miss and highly specific to each individual. What works for me may not work for you. Hell, what worked for me last year may not work for me this year, or with my next book.

Based on my perceived value, I assign a multiplier. If I got 4x the value from a thing, the multiplier is 4. If I got only half the value I expected, the multiplier is 0.5. At the end of a month or a year, I can look back and sum it all up. Here’s an example of what that might look like (not actual amounts). The multipliers are of course entirely subjective, but as long as Value is higher than Cost overall, I’m happy.

While I would love to say that I get to spend all my writing time just writing, I don’t. But having a few processes set up as guardrails allows me to minimize the cognitive noise around the business of writing, which frees me up to write a whole lot more.