Self-Publishing Sunday – Pushing Yourself

Happy Sunday to you!

This week, I thought I’d talk about the concept of pushing yourself. In self-publishing, as in traditional publishing, the key to earning is publishing a lot. Traditional publishers don’t have just one author and one book. Self publishers can’t make money by producing only one book.

But, as self-publishers, time is at a premium and it has to be used wisely and productively. I think it’s easy to get into a habit of simply putting out what you’re able, rather than to really push the limits and do more. Certainly, you don’t want to put out so much so quickly that it’s of poor quality, but sometimes we can do so much more than we are doing.

Writing a book, an entire book, is an amazing accomplishment.  If you’ve done so, you deserve a pat on the back. It takes follow-through and stick-to-it to get it accomplished. But, once the book is published, for a career, there need to be more. Otherwise you’re no more than a one-hit wonder.

So, this week, I challenge you to explore your limits. This week ask yourself:

What does my perfect publishing schedule look like?
What’s stopping me from getting there?
What can I do to get closer to my goal?

Then, it’s time to push. It’s time to push the limits of what you’re doing and go a little bit further. You don’t have to move from writing 500 words a day to 2,000 if you’re not ready. But, what about 1,250? Can you give it a try?

For me, my rabbit hole seems to be editing. I’m pretty decent with daily word count when I’m working on a story. But after I finish the first draft, it takes months to get it published. I seem to really stall in the editing phase. For me, I’m going to push myself when it comes to editing.

At the beginning of the year, I decided to try to eschew daily word counts some months in favor of taking time to edit. However, that’s just made my editing woes worse, not better. So, I’ve decided to push my limits. I’m not going to try to write a specific word count. I’m just going to write for set time each day, so I can get some word count. But, I’m also going to forge ahead on the editing. I’m going to set daily editing limits, push those limits to get my work into decent shape. And I’m going to stick to it.

My hope is that pushing this limit will make me more productive this year. If I can keep on top of editing, I should meet my goals of publishing five books this year. Three are completely written, with two in various stages of my editing. One is partially written, and the other hasn’t been started yet (so, yeah, from scratch in less than six months; but it’s totally doable, I think. At least if I push myself to the limit).

Now, I’m not suggesting you burn yourself out. But, I think we need to push a little  harder before we can figure out our hard limit. Let’s make a little magic happen, folks. 🙂