52 books in 52 weeks: The Author Organizer

I set myself the goal of reading and reviewing 52 writing guides over the year. Here is book 22.

The Author Organizer: How to anticipate, survive and master the whirlpool of your publishing career by Ella Medler is one of a set of (currently) seven from Paper Gold Publishing. That’s quite typical of me, arriving late to the party. But I was so impressed with this book, I bought another one and then joined the forum.

Incidentally, if you join Paper Gold Publishing as a member, rather than as just a subscriber, you have access to this and the other six titles in the series, absolutely FREE OF CHARGE. Membership is FREE too. Otherwise, all of the titles are 99p each, or $1.28 in the States.

It’s a very short book, only 35 pages, and it took me just 25 minutes to read from cover to cover. It refers to material in an earlier book, but doesn’t go into detail, instead suggesting the reader reads the first book in the series as well. On the one hand, I like this, as it means if you bought the first book then you’re not getting a load of old material repeated here. On the other, I think it makes very savvy business sense.

The book begins as though you are a total novice and quickly runs through things like setting up an email account, creating a website, opening accounts on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, and then creating accounts on all of the self-publishing platforms you’d like to use.

It goes on to cover things like a short biography, a longer biography and how to choose an author picture.

Then it suggests ways to organise your files on your computer, how many directories to open, what to keep where, which files to duplicate, and so on. I’ve been using something similar to this myself for many, many years. My own main work directory is MASTER; the author’s, in this case, is WORK. And in her BOOKS folder, she includes sub-directories for various SERIES, STANDALONEs and SPINOFFs, and any others that help her keep her business running smoothly.

Each of the chapters covers a separate topic or function, there are graphic illustrations (as in graphs, not graphic, but not actual graphs …) followed by a summary and a check-list.

If you’re just starting out, this is a great little resource to give you something to do while waiting for your writing business to get off the ground. If you’re an established writer, it’s just as great for helping you to organise your work. If you’re already a very organised writer, as is yours truly, then it reinforces what you’re already doing and may even give you some new ideas.

As previously mentioned, The Author Organizer: How to anticipate, survive and master the whirlpool of your publishing career is only available on Kindle at the moment for 99p ($1.28), or the ebook is FREE if you join  Paper Gold Publishing. I’ll be learning more about this and other online resources, and will probably review it in the future.

8 thoughts on “52 books in 52 weeks: The Author Organizer

  1. Thanks for this it sounds like the sort of book I could find really useful! Off to have a look.

  2. This sounds like a God book for me, I’m very disorganised and tend to keep everything in my head. I’m also finding one of your previous ones useful ‘Writing your non fiction book’

  3. That should be good book…. I’m working on one eye at the moment so things are a bit burry!

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