Tag: #BookLaunch

Anniversaries and Un-Resolutions

A New Year Doesn’t Have to Mean New Business

Sometimes the best resolution is no resolution at all. Photo by Sonam Yadav from Pexels

Happy New Year friends! The last couple of weeks have been long-ish stretches of quiet time interspersed with short bursts of crazy. On January 4th we celebrated our 23rd wedding anniversary with a family party.

Our party theme was Minecraft Farm. We bought a Llama pinata, then beat it up and took all it’s candy.

I knit and crocheted many things for the kids.

My child calls these stuffies Mr. Kitty Hat and Blue

Slowly Walking Down the Hall Faster Than a Cannon Ball

In between making stuffed animals, I completed interviews for various outlets interested in remote work. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you saw the post from Digital Nomad Sage last week. Another interview came out today from Remoters. I was also on the radio with Money Matters based in Houston. I’m on the radio again next week with Drive Thru HR.

I’ve been simultaneously on vacation AND working like a maniac. I took 2 weeks off from my day job so I could relax with the kids’ during their winter break. I scheduled that time off 8 months ago, before I knew the date my book would launch. Friends, my book launched today.

I nearly spent my entire vacation working on book stuff. Launching a book resembles planning a wedding. There are a lot of moving pieces and different players that work together before the main event. My book launch to-do list runneth-ed over. (We’ll just pretend ‘runneth-ed’ is a word.)

There’s a Fine Line Between Optimism and Delusion

I planned to cram a lot of writing time into the two weeks I was off. I use the word ‘plan’ loosely here. It was more of a wish list that had nothing to do with reality. I was going to: 1) Read a lot of research on psychological safety, 2) Work out every day, 3) Write three articles about remote work, 4) Spend quality time with my kids in between 5) Planning our family party and 6) Launching my book.

Then my oldest kid got sick on the first day of winter break. Shortly thereafter the second one got sick. And the rain of Vancouver closed in. Instead of focusing on my writing, I spent the first days of winter vacation knitting on the couch in between taking care of the kids. It should have frustrated me more than it did. But the fact was, I was mentally depleted. I needed time to let my brain go fallow. So I made the last-minute decision to work in short sprints so I could spend the majority of my time lazing about with the kids.

Who Says You Have to Vow to Resolve Anything in 2020?

Taking a break is hard if you’ve been running yourself ragged. It feels weird to just do…nothing for stretches of time. At least it was for me. I am a woman of action. It’s especially hard at the beginning of the year when everyone wants to hear your New Year’s Resolutions.

But you know what? New Year’s Resolutions aren’t the boss of you. If this is where you’re at right now–mentally depleted–the best resolution might be no resolutions in 2020. Or if you can’t quite do that, consider ‘take better breaks’ as your resolution of choice. My resolutions are usually hedonistic. One year I resolved to eat awesome cookies. Several years ago I went in search of better cheese. I wasn’t going to pick a resolution at all this year, but ‘take better breaks’ is growing on me. I’m going to sit with the idea in the back of my brain for the month of January and see how I like it.

Do you make hedonistic or subversive New Year’s resolutions? I’d love to hear about them.

Remote Book Relaunch

A Peak Behind the book publishing curtain

You need a lot of fuel to get a rocket into space. You need nearly the same amount of caffeine to launch a book. Photo by Pixabay from Pexels.com

My book for remote employees is going to launch with Simon Schuster in January 2020. I’ve known about this for some time, but we had to hit a certain point in the book launch process before I could share details with you. Today, as a thank you for sticking with me during the great blog post slowdown of October/November 2019, I want to give you a peak behind the book launch curtain.

The Book is Getting a New Title

My co-authors and I signed a book contract that says our publisher has the right to change the title if necessary. This is The Way Things Go in traditional publishing, and I have no problem with it. Titles aren’t my forte. I don’t know how a person can write a book and post articles (nearly) every week for more than a year and still have trouble coming up with good titles, but that’s me in a nutshell.

We’re really lucky that our original indie publisher 750 is committed to keeping its authors looped in as much as possible. Instead, they gave us Simon Schuster’s feedback and let us propose another title.

If you or anyone you know is thinking of writing a business book, Simon Schuster thinks that the best business book titles are clear. The title should not only tell you what the book is about, but who it’s for. I love our old title ‘Secrets of the Remote Workforce,’ but that doesn’t tell you who the book is for. We fixed that with the new title.

Is the title of the book sexy? No. But it does tell you what you’re going to get and I like that.

May I present Working Remotely: Secrets to Success for Employees on Distributed Teams. Holly, Mike and I came up with this title the same way we wrote the book. We proposed different titles, talked through what we liked and disliked, and came up with something together.

For those who aren’t familiar with the book, we discuss how to survive and thrive as a remote employee. We cover how to set up your office, how to combat loneliness, and how go grow in your career when you work from an office of one.

The Team Has a Publicist

Publishing a book is a little surreal. Most people have opinions about the things they’ve done. Some of us decide to write a book about what we know. We believe we wrote a book with a lot of useful information to share with remote employees. We spent a lot of time making sure we covered remote-specific topics. On some level, though, it’s still surprising that a traditional publisher agreed to release our book out into the world.

Getting a publicist brings the surreal feeling to another level. We have access to an expert to help us get the word out about our book. That’s pretty neat. I collect skills the way crazy cat ladies collect cats, and I can’t wait to see what I learn from this experience. We’re working on a few things that aren’t quite ready to talk about yet, but I look forward to sharing them with you in due course.

While you CAN have too many cats, you can’t have too many skills. Anyway that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Photo by Pixabay from Pexels.com

Did you like this sneak peak? Leave me a comment to let me know either way. Is there anything about book publishing you would love to know about? Leave that question in the comments. If there’s enough interest in the business side of book publishing I’ll post other tidbits as we gear up to launch the book.