Hello Internet. It is 62 days until my novel, TAKE ON ME is published. (that’s its cover up there! I just realized I failed to do a cover reveal blog or even link to the cover reveal on the Fireside page… oh hey you can pre-order it too!) The rapid release schedule for all 3 books means that I just turned in my final changes to Book 2: CRUEL SUMMER. I’m also working on Book 3: RUNNING DOWN A DREAM, so it’s been a little hard to focus. I’m super glad to have an amazing publisher who can send me messages reminding me of the promotional things I have upcoming and take care of sending out advance copies and all of those things. There is absolutely no way I’d be half as successful at this on my own.
The rapid release schedule also means that I’m kind of flying in the dark. I’m finishing Book 3 and very few people have read book 1, so the level of doubt and fear about people hating the whole series is VERY HIGH. My response to this impending publication anxiety has so far to be very very quiet. I was thinking about that response and how very little good that does for anyone, it just isolates me, and perpetuates… I don’t know the false hope that publication changes everything and makes it easier? The more I talk to authors I consider ahead of me on their career journey the more I realize I’m doing OK and no one really has it all figured out.
In a perfect world I’d have a whole trunk full of short stories I would be submitting like mad right now to get a few acceptances and publications roughly around the time TAKE ON ME comes out. But, I don’t have short stories ready to submit and only a few I should be looking for reprint markets for. I don’t have a lot of time or energy to do that AND work on novel stuff.
It’s weird, but sometimes impending publication panic just comes out of nowhere and I find my heart racing and thinking out worst case scenarios. Logically I know that some people will love the book (hopefully a lot of people, but I realize my work is not for everyone) and that some will bounce off of it (hopefully less people), and some might flat out hate it. That’s totally normal and I have really no control over any of that. All I can do is try to reach as many people as possible who MIGHT want to check it out. I’m going to try and be more communicative about how this whole process goes over the next 60 days or so and what the soon to be debut author mind is like (well… sort of. I am going to censor myself. Some days it is just panicked flailing and a non-stop internal monologue of swearing, and you can imagine that part for yourself). So if you have any questions or conversations you’d like to have, let me know. I’m going to go ahead and turn comments on for this post and we’ll see how that goes. What questions do you have for me about TAKE ON ME, writing novels, impending publication, working on a series, rapid release, working with small press publisher, etc?
MINERVA ZIMMERMAN 
Holy cow, three books at once! How did you decide to do a rapid release schedule? Do you think writing all three books in such close succession makes it easier or harder?
I originally wrote it all as one (slightly over-long) book, but the longer I looked at it the more it seemed to work better as three shorter novels and Fireside Fiction agreed with that assessment.
Rapid release makes sense because we can use the inertia of each release to promote the whole series each time a new one is released. The plan is that once all three books are released we can do a print version of all three novels together and also push the ebook sales at the same time so it’s more little pushes that will hopefully lead to bigger inertia as more people find the series.
It is easier to edit as a whole but I think maybe a little more stressful on the author? I’m not really sure I don’t actually have an alternate data point to contrast it with.