Whew, February is done. Time to take a look at what I managed to accomplish.
If you’ve been following along with the blog then you already know that for 2023 I’ve left myself a big BLANK page of year long goals. I’ll add to them when I focus on them and mark them completed when I finish. I’m focusing where I want/need to focus for the month and celebrating wins. Here’s how that’s looking after February comes to an end.
This month I decided to focus on making more progress on the Fraun Special Edition formatting and proofreading that I started in January. I made enough progress to consider myself on track for this one, although this will come up again in March (it’s a big undertaking). I also spoke again with the cover designer and we’re making progress on that. I hope I’ll have a reveal for you soon! I’m shooting for a project and cover reveal in March.
After finishing up the work on the Special Edition I turned my attention to the short story collection. These need to go to the ARC readers in March, so I have to get them done. I did something unusual (for me) and started by formatting the entire thing FIRST. Nothing makes me crazier than proofing an entire book only to have things get messed up in formatting. So I’m trying formatting first and proofreading from a formatted copy so I’ll spot formatting mistakes in the proofread. It’s not a bad plan. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it sooner, honestly.
Anyway, this collection of short stories is 6 stories so my graphic is 6 cute little trees. Some of those stories, however, are broken further down into sections or chapters. You’ll notice dark green accents on the trees representing those. I was able to finish the first 5 (which are the shortest 5 and the ones that have not gone through as many rounds of edits). This leaves me with only the longest final story to finalize before release. I’ll wrap that one up in March. This actually goes out to my ARC team this week!
If you’re interested in joining my ARC team, send an email to tabatha@tabathashipleybooks.com and let me know!
All told, I managed to write about 120 words per day (most of those were honestly book reviews) and edited a shocking 65 chapters. Not bad at all.
Despite feeling like I never had time to do any work, I did manage to get a lot of reading done. Most of this, if I’m being honest, was while sitting at children’s activities waiting for things to start or while sitting in a car (thank you, Audiobooks).
As it was in January, I knocked out another 13 books in the month of February bringin my total to 26 books for 2023. This accounted for 4,241 pages (breaking down to about 151 pages per day). The oldest book I read this month was published in 1998 and the newest was an advanced reader copy of a title releasing in 2023.
- 1 Middle Grade
- 2 Young Adult
- 10 Adult
- 2 Fantasy
- 2 Contemporary
- 1 Science Fiction
- 6 Mystery/Thriller
- 1 Nonfiction
- 1 Horror
- 3 Independently Published (that’s 23%)
- 3 ebooks
- 7 audiobooks
- 1 paperback
- 2 hardcovers
Of those formats the breakdown works like this:
No books received a 1-star rating. 3 were 2-star (problematic). 1 3-star (niche but good). 5 4-star (recommended if you read that genre). 4 5-star genre-crossing amazing reads.
So, in conclusion:
- Final round of edits is back from the editor on the Hitman project, meaning we’re on track to see that one come out later this year
- Made progress on the formatting of the Special Fraun project, putting me on track to get that one published this year as well
- Met with the cover designer for the Special Fraun project and made project on that formatting/proofreading
- Mostly finished with the formatting and proofing of the short stories, meaning we’re on track to get those out to ARC readers this week
- Read and reviewed 13 books, 23% of which were independently published
2/12 of the way done with 2023 and not hating this blank goals page strategy yet! Onto March …
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