This week we released the second edition of Jeff Carlson’s Take Control of Your Digital Storage, which has been selling at a good clip. As usual when we have a new release, we had a higher-than-average number of customer support inquiries and small glitches to deal with, so those sorts of things took up a good bit of time. I made more progress on my updated iCloud book, and with any luck I’ll be able to wrap that up and get it out next week. Give or take. I made only a little new progress on my Big Sur book.
I also did a bunch of administrative work, including our monthly royalty calculations and payments, discussions with several authors about their ongoing projects, and other boring behind-the-scenes tasks. (Also, both of my Macs had issues this week that required hours of troubleshooting. Gah.)
Anyway, what with one thing and another, I made no further progress on my master to-do list, which remains, as last week, at 98 items. It would be overstating the case to say, “At least I maintained my sanity.” I remained ambulatory and solvent, but that’s about it.
As I look at the list of new and updated books we have planned for the remainder of 2020, the number is (pauses to count) 33. There are, however, only 23 weeks left in the year. When conditions are ideal (which they aren’t) and we’re firing on all cylinders (which we aren’t), we can sometimes release a book per week, with the very occasional two-book week, but even then, we can’t sustain that sort of frantic schedule for months on end. Meanwhile, we have tons of things to do beyond publishing books (see previous weeks’ posts for details).
With all that work facing me, plus two kids at home and no plans for schools to reopen in the fall (not to mention the general state of the world), you can see how I might be perpetually anxious and stressed.
So that’s all I’ve got for today. Gotta get back to work. Fingers crossed that I’ll be feeling slightly more optimistic next week, and will have interesting new things to report.