How I’m training my brain to create quickly.
One of the talented members of my writing group publishes on Amazon’s Kindle Vella. If you’re not familiar with the service, it is a place for readers to find serialized stories, usually novella-length. (I assume that “Vella” comes from “novella.”) Writers can publish their stories in segments like they used to do in old magazines.
During one of our monthly check-ins, the Vella writer told our group about her process, and I was gobsmacked. The sheer precision of her schedule might as well have been engineered in Germany. That’s when it hit me: if I want to be a successful author in this day and age, I need to get my own process and schedule together.
I might not intend to publish on Vella, but I certainly have a lot to learn about writing discipline. With each manuscript I write, I try to be more organized, structured, and swift.
I simply don’t have decades to write all that I want to write.
As an experiment, I’m practicing streamlining a publishing process of sorts through creating a series of coloring books and publishing them on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).
*Does anyone else wonder if we’ll all be working for or with Amazon sooner or later?*
The first attempt, The Bun Family Coloring Book, took me about two weeks to draw, format, and revise until KDP accepted it. I hoped to have it live by Easter—alas, I kept messing up the formatting and missed that seasonal opportunity. However, it’s now available on Amazon.
Next, I took the basic drawings of the characters and altered them for the next edition, Buns Around the World. Since I already had the formatted pages and cover to work with, I was able to create and submit it in three days. (It is still under review as of this writing. I had to resubmit the cover because a character image in front of the title flagged it.)
I hope to produce the next coloring book in two days or less.
I learned that I could link the two coloring books together as a series so that they show up together in Amazon searches. Over time, as I build this series’s offerings, I will analyze if the bundle of products is more successful than my standalone workbook, This One’s For You, Messy Kid.
Yes, drawing pictures of bunnies is easier than writing a novel, but sometimes it pays to learn a process simply, and then apply that knowledge to a more complex model. That’s my plan, anyway.
I’ll let you know how it works out!