Maximize Your Book-Writing Productivity
/How to Find Time to Work on Your Book When You Don’t Have Time to Work on Your Book
If you find yourself struggling to stay focused and productive with your book-writing endeavor, we invite you to give yourself a break. In fact, you can even use distractions to your advantage! Turn your attention to other aspects of your writing that are easy to be pushed aside when you are “in the zone” but nevertheless important. Below are some ideas of tasks you can tackle even when you don’t have much time:
Write Your Author Bio
If you’re publishing a book, you need an author bio. It’ll be everywhere: on your back cover, on your website, on your online profiles, etc. It’s easy to feel pressure to get this mighty little paragraph just right, but we suggest hammering out a quick draft while you watch TV and letting it sit for a day before returning to it and tweaking it until you’re happy with it.
Envision Your Book Cover
Are you preparing for the design phase? Do you know what you want your book cover to look like? Are you out doing your holiday shopping or online scouring Pinterest for recipes? Keep your eyes peeled for books whose covers you find appealing! Accumulating pictures of your favorite covers is a fun way to narrow down your taste and vision for your magnum opus.
Request Endorsements
As you near publication, it’s customary to reach out to people in your network for endorsements to include in your book—it’s one of the best ways to increase sales. Use the holidays as time to brainstorm whom you’d like to share your manuscript with, and reach out to them to ask them for their blurbs. (Inspira clients get extra help with this: we’ll provide you with a Reviewers’ Copy PDF of your manuscript, and help you draft an accompanying endorsement request so you can send it off easily and confidently!)
Plan Your Marketing
Marketing a book takes focus, creativity, and resourcefulness. If you’re not in book-writing mode, get into book-marketing mode by strategizing the best way to reach your audience. This can look like scheduling Instagram posts, writing a batch of emails to your website subscribers, or calling up local bookshops to discuss author events. Inspira can help you with this: reach out to us to learn more about our press release and marketing services!
Update Your Website
We’ve mentioned the importance of having an author website and we’ll say it again: you need an author website! If you don’t have one, this is the time to look into starting one. Dream up domain names, visit other author websites, and envision what you’d like yours to look like. Have fun and play around with it: this is a unique opportunity to express yourself and showcase your work! And, if you want to bring in the pros, Inspira is here to help you with our author website service.
We wish you all a cheery, meaningful beginning to the holiday season and lots of momentum in all areas of your writing journey!
The Inspira Team