Spirit & Intent

For those of you who don't know, I recently launched a tiny, independent publishing company as well as published three books which can be found on my Books page. (They can also be found on the company website). 

My company is called Spirit & Intent and there are a lot of things we hope to do over next year in addition to publishing books. In the meantime, I'm so happy we can finally share things like our logo and website. We've honestly been working on them for over a year now! 

But even though we've launched and had this really wonderful article shared about us, there is still a lot of work to do. For the first time in my life, I'm essentially running a business and because of that there is a lot of planning I have to do to help the company grow in a positive manner. Right now, the company is only publishing books that I've written because those copyrights are already mine to work with. It will take quite a bit more work and additional resources to branch out and include other writers in the way I would like to and in a way that would create a great situation for them. Hopefully, this is something we can look at in the future. Until then, all of us writers are lucky that the tools to publish are available to us all. More and more, indie publishing seems like the best possible route, at least to me.  

Still, I have to say—though it's been a lot of work and even more work lies ahead, I have never been happier. Writing has always made me happy, but in the past few years it's brought me more joy than I could ever have imagined. I'm so excited about all of the upcoming projects we have planned and the various ways we're going to share them. There's a lot to learn and I'm loving learning it.

One of my big goals with starting a publishing company that I talked about way back in an earlier blog was to help myself learn the Cayuga language. There are a lot of really fantastic resources out there for learning Cayuga but what I know for sure helped me expand my ability to speak & write English—was reading. I hoped that connecting my love of reading with my desire to learn the language would result in some interesting projects & though we haven't shared those projects yet, I really think it will :). 

We've set up a Twitter account, a Facebook page and a newsletter. In one week, we're going to do a giveaway of a set of our books plus an art print to one of our lucky newsletter subscribers. Interested? Click here to subscribe!

This week I have been listening to the Joanna Penn's Creative Penn podcast pretty much non-stop. It's a super inspiring podcast that I'm very grateful exists and as it's a nice long weekend, I've revised my weekend to-do list to follow-up some of the topics that came up during my listening. This includes:

• Working on copywriting and sales descriptions for my books
• Trying Scrivener again and learning how to set Project Goals
• Contacting an editor to help me set a firm deadline for a project I want to publish in April 
• Creating a pre-order button for another book; and
• Revisiting my publishing schedule for the next year to set the word count targets I need to meet deadlines 

Basically, I'm looking forward to a weekend of reading, writing and editing—the best kind there is!  What about you? What are your plans for the weekend? 

Until next time, happy writing!

S.