Meredith Mansfield, Author

This week I was reminded of a quote I heard a long time ago.

A worried investor once asked J. P. Morgan for investment advice, saying that his portfolio was keeping him up at night. Morgan’s response was “Sell down to the sleeping point.”

Well, that’s what I’m doing with my purely internal deadlines for THE VOICE OF PROPHECY.

I have every confidence that I’ll have it ready by December 15. That’s the important date and it hasn’t changed. But if I was still trying to put this up for pre-order tomorrw, I wouldn’t be sleeping. (And that just might impact my ability to finish it to my satisfaction. I don’t write as fast or as well when I’m tired.)

Partly, this is due to the rules surrounding pre-orders on Amazon. Specifically, you can’t upload new versions within ten days of the release date. That makes the deadline for having everything as perfect as I can make it December 4th, not just to finish revising and polishing the story, but to get all the formatting done, and to have a polished excerpt from Book 3 to include. (Without pre-order, I’d normally be uploading my final version on the 13th or 14th.)

A lot of it is to do with my own tendency to get a little compulsive about deadlines.

Now, I’m still planning to use pre-order and I very likely will have everything done well before the 4th. But, I’ll have a lot better chance of doing that if I’m not making myself crazy with a pre-order deadline. And as soon as I have it ready, I’ll put it up for pre-order.

Lesson: Next time, I need to plan much farther ahead for a pre-order. Amazon only made pre-orders available for self-publishers after I’d already set the release date for THE IGNORED PROPHECY. I just didn’t really have the time to set myself up for it. I’ll be better able to take it into account with the next one.