Confessions of an Overworked Author Mom

I love when people ask me how it feels to not have a real job and stay home to raise a family.  As a self-published author, that does not equal a career to many of my friends or some of my family members.  I thought this morning that I'd share a little insight into my daily life, and hopefully a few of those mentioned above might get that I put in more hours than they could even consider.  Seriously, I don't have a real job?

My normal day starts at five in the morning, usually without a cup of coffee because that has to wait until other things are in order.  The youngest of my crew has a chocolate milk addiction so the first task of the day starts with fixing breakfast and chocolate milk for the two of the five that aren't old enough to feed themselves yet.  We get dressed and since it's summer, the iPad has become my favorite friend since I can't stay tied to a computer all day.

After breakfast and getting the little people dressed and settled into their morning cartoons I open up emails, check blog stats, and look at the sales of books from the previous day.  The sales have to be put into an excel document and I check those sales against what I blogged the day before to see if what I'm writing is encouraging people to buy a book.  The next hour is spent returning emails and trying to come up with ideas for the three blogs I run.  

Summer time is absolute death when it comes to sales.  People for the most part are enjoying outdoor activities, spending time with family, and that makes marketing tougher than it is during the school year.  As a self-published author, if I don't sell books I don't get paid so I've found I have to double my efforts to market in the summer months.  

I grab my handy dandy iPad and take it around the house as I try to make it look less like the jungle the kids leave it in every night.  I'll make a bed then head over to Google and search new marketing ideas, put on a load of clothes and then send those ideas back to email so I can look over them when my house is done.  There is very rarely a time during the day when I'm not connected.  From five in the morning until four in the afternoon, I combine working the daily tasks of my home, spending time with kids, and planning marketing strategies for sales.  Something I believe strongly in, is that if you aren't analyzing what's working for others in sales, you will fail.  

I start cooking dinner around four because my husband and oldest son are usually starving by the time they come in from work and I try to stay off the computer until they go to sleep.  Believe me it kills me to not be online during those times, and I understand that I have become a workaholic.  My insane pace doesn't end on the weekends either, I just have to find time to work around my husbands ideas of what the family should be doing for fun.  Did I mention that he hates computers and would prefer having a home with no electronics (that won't be happening by the way lol).  

I know I haven't listed all the things that go on during the day around here, but they change according to what task needs to be done.  Rewriting manuscripts, creating advertisements, looking up new promotional items, designing products to sale, writing blog articles, and seriously I could go on and on but I think you get the idea.  The point is on most days I think it would be easier to have a full time job that you were allowed to disconnect from when the work day is over.