A month ago, I was drowning in emails. My phone dinged with alerts. I had heart palpitations every time I tried to confront my out of control inbox. It was common for me to wake up to fifty (or more!) new emails every morning. After working all day, I’d come home to dozens of new emails. I couldn’t keep up and had a difficult time sorting the important, time-sensitive stuff from the fluff.

Today, things have changed. My inbox is manageable. New emails trickle in at a much slower pace. The stress associated with checking my email is gone.

How did I do it? By making a few, easy changes.

1. I unsubscribed. I don’t do a lot of online ordering, but somehow I ended up on a ton of mailing lists. Most of the online stores who emailed me with special deals and sales offer the same ‘deal’ to everyone. There…

Do you need help organizing your writing?

Well, I do!

Because sometimes I’ve had so many files swirling around in my computer that I forgot which one was the last one.

I check the dates. Grab what looks like the right one, but lo and behold there is another one way over on the other side of a black hole.

Head slap! How in the hell did a 100 pages end up with the cookie recipes?

Listen, I’ve always considered myself a pretty organized person. I like the potato chips on the bottom shelf of the pantry. Drives me nuts when someone moves them around.

But sometimes my fiction runs rampant, and like scurrying little mice, stories duck into hiding spaces on the far side of my computer.

Glad I found the following article in my inbox.

Hope it helps you too.

How to for Authors…

Writing: How to Keep Your Manuscripts Organized byBetsy Talbot

Lots…

There’s even MORE shit I have to do?

While you are building (or expanding) your platform, it’s a great time to polish, edit and add or delete whatever you want added to or deleted from your book. Plus, a lot of the time we have to make choices about what the blurb will say and what the cover needs to look like. Bouncing that stuff off a bunch of Facebook author page friends or Twitter followers or Blog subscribers is a great way to see what the feedback is – and spend no money to find out.

Part of the way you increase your base is by adding people as followers on Twitter, Facebook, and your blog, or whatever other social media you like doing. Most of you have blogs, so let’s focus there.

That’s how it feels, yeah.

Look what happened when I posted and tweeted about my…