The Most Important Words You’ll Ever Write

I have a picture of my grandmother (born 1875) sitting at a table on which several books repose. She wears a dainty white dress and leans on her elbow toward an open book. Two young gentlemen also have books open in front of them, but the smile on my grandmother’s face, evident despite the faded sepia, says she knows she’s the focus of their attention. Unfortunately, we writers have so much more to than look fetching.
We writers do so much more than just write. There’s social media (e.g. Twitter and FB) not to mention keeping up a website and blogging regularly. Then, of course, we really ought to have a professional marketing plan which we’ll end up doing ourselves because we can’t afford to pay for it. Finally, we must decide which online sites to join to get our books ‘out there’ or to find compatible writing friends who will advise, console, and cheer us on.
But before any of the above-mentioned tasks…please…stop…consider how to put together the one document which will save you untold time and frustration. Quite simply, as the title of this article states, it is The Most Important Words You’ll Ever Write.
So let’s get started.
Open a new document and call it “Publication Information”.
List every one of your publications and include the following:
1. Title
2. Publisher
3. Publication date
4. Cover artist
5. Genre
6. Number of pages or word count
7. ASIN
8. ISBN-10, ISBN-13
9. Buy links (consider using a Tiny Url)
10. Links to book trailer, if any, on YouTube
11. Tag line (one line description)
12. Blurb
13. Excerpt
14. You might even compose half a dozen ‘tweets’ or Facebook posts to keep handy.
15. Any other pertinent information you want to have handy.
Keep this up to date!
Now open a new folder and include all your cover pictures and your head shot AND tuck this document away in the same folder.
Can you see where I’m going with this? When you are trying to upload information to an author’s site, for example, you have everything you need at your fingertips. No more jumping around copying and pasting, etc. It’s all there. It took me a long time to learn that getting all my information together was worth every second it took.
I wish I’d figured all this out much, much earlier. I keep my house, my desk, and my personal business organized. But when it came to writing business…I blush to say it was a mess! Dealing with fifteen different books became a nightmare of click-click, copy-paste, and many lost hours, not to mention patience.
If you’re shaking your head while muttering, “Duh!” because you figured out all this from the beginning of your writing career, let me congratulate you—sincerely—and slink away . But if you’re just getting started, consider this article. You won’t regret it.