Hey everyone,
Success! My interviews for the ghostwriting project are finally done, and I’m heaving a huge sigh of relief. I have hours of interviews to transcribe before I can start writing the sample chapters, and I intend to do it all myself because I want to pick up on the nuances of my subject’s speaking style so I can write in a way that’s true to her voice.
This is something I really struggle with. Jobs such as editing and transcription should ideally be outsourced so that I don’t have to spend hours at my desk, but even now, twenty years into my career, I find it difficult to let some of it go.
Part of it is the control freak in me, I know, but I also feel as though I learn something each time I undertake these tasks myself.
Or maybe that’s just me making excuses.
I cannot wait to share this story with you and this book proposal is now the most important thing on my desk. Because of the nature of the story, however, I have to remain tight-lipped about it, which if you know me, is something I find incredibly difficult. Maybe I’ll start dropping little hints until I’m ready to spill.
Anyway, speaking of marketing, I took a little break from editing The Freelance Writer’s Guide series to think about marketing and how I want to relaunch these titles. There are too many to relaunch one at a time. I think I’d get bored! I have seven titles in the series now, and I intend for there to be ten in total by the time I’m done. So I’ve decided that I’ll relaunch the current titles in the series all in one go, then publish the others one at a time. I’ll do a separate launch of Shut Up and Write: The No-Nonsense, No B.S. Guide To Getting Words on the Page, which is a standalone book.
It’s daunting, thinking about all the marketing, but this time I want to do it well, the way I would for any of my novels. So I’m making lists. Experience says that future me will either really love me for doing all this brainstorming work and writing down extremely detailed instructions for what she needs to do, or she’s going to hate my guts for giving her such a large to-do list to wade through.
I’ve been looking to the music industry for inspiration, studying famous artists to see how they launch and talk about their work. In addition to playing Bowie on repeat, I have the monster McCartney biography by Philip Norman sitting on my desk. I was intending to read it to study craft but I’m hoping to find examples of outrageous behavior to model, too. (My son’s name comes from the song Hey Jude and Sir Paul McCartney lives in Sussex, as do we, and so you’ll understand why it’s completely reasonable that we should consider him honorary family.)
I’ll let you know what I find. Could be a while, though—it’s 800 pages!
In the meantime, if you run a website or blog for writers and would like to review any of my books, let me know! I’ll add you to the list of people we send them out to when I relaunch in a couple of months.
More tomorrow.
Cheers,
Natasha