Sometimes I make poor life decisions.
Sometimes I do dumb things like stay up all night reading when I know perfectly well the baby will be up before dawn. Or I go to the bank without to bringing the check I needed to cash. Or I completely forget that my wedding anniversary is a thing and was last week, apparently.
Sometimes I have two completely different books coming out within weeks of each other.
You already know about my new play, The Love of Three Oranges (one-act version), but what I haven’t mentioned over here is that I’ve actually got two books releasing this fall. My newest e-commerce book about running your own Selling Assistance business out of your home, Sell Their Stuff, is coming out November 1st.
You have to read the title with a little attitude for the full effect.
That’s two books I’ve got to promote… in completely unrelated genres… one of which releases the same day NaNoWriMo starts… while I write 50,000 words… and run all local NaNo events as the ML… and work through the biggest sales volume of the year in my retail store… wrangling a soon to be 2-year-old… during the already busy holidays.
Why, you’re asking, do I do these things to myself? And I don’t have an answer other than to tell you that I had no idea that The Love of Three Oranges (one-act version) would be out so soon when I signed the contract and unavoidable delays with editorial pushed Sell Their Stuff back juuust enough to put its release right smack in the middle of NaNoWriMo season. If I pushed it any later, I’d miss the bulk of the holiday season so there wasn’t any other choice.
It’s going to be a lot of work. I’ve got blog tours, giveaways and posts for each book as well as press releases and other marketing brouhaha going on. Sell Their Stuff alone represents over a decade of work so I really need to move copies to make it worth the time I spent on it.
Looking on the bright side, though, I usually have my highest traffic of the year to this site during November because of NaNoWriMo so hopefully the extra eyeballs on the site will mean more book sales. While the books have nothing in common other than my name, marketing is marketing and I’ll probably find sneaky ways to cross-promote as I go and let each book piggy back on the other’s marketing. As for the extra work load, as NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty is so often reminding us, objects in motion tend to stay in motion and, sometimes, the busier you are, the more you end up getting done.
And, yes, I am extremely aware that I’m fortune to have either of these opportunities, let alone both, and I’m not complaining… not really. By now, you’ve probably realized I enjoy giving myself a bit more than I can handle just to see how I do with it. But one thing’s for sure, it’s going to make for an interesting autumn.
Now, please, someone talk me out of trying to get one MORE book out before the end of the year…
Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
