One Honest Indie

“Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself.” ― Seth Godin, Poke the Box

My Office Organizing Project

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Photo by Rob Bye on Unsplash

Now, there’s an aspirational photo! 🙂

Hi everyone. Well, I just spent the weekend, one, going to a book fair on Saturday at the University of Maryland on Maryland Day. And it was really nice. It was, well, it was a little chilly, but it was really nice just to get out and see other people and be with other authors and with other University of Maryland alum. So that was nice.

Me, at the Terp Book Fair on Saturday, April 25, 2026!

And they had pizza and stuff for us to eat and coffee to drink and tea. So it was all very nice. They had fruit, they had salad. Anyway, I won’t go on about that. I did sell a book, which was kind of nice. Technically two books, I think. Although I had a problem with the QR code situation. I don’t know how these things work. I mean, I was trying to figure it out before I went and I was just not quite … Something wasn’t working.

I thought, okay, does it automatically put in the merchant’s code? Is that the way that works? I don’t know.

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Adopting ‘Zen Habits’

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Hey, so I’m engaging in a new habit. I have this book. I’ve had it for some time. I’ve read through it. I have tried to follow some of its advice. And actually, what I thought I would do is be a little more deliberate in my use of this book. What I’m going to try to do is use one of these tips every single day and see how it works out, how much progress I make. And actually, I have to admit the very first task he has in here, not task, but item, I guess. I don’t know.

Decluttering. Decluttering has been a huge problem for me. I have a tendency to keep old articles that I think would be great sources of potential ideas for stories. I have a tendency to keep old research and old drafts. I keep things in the interest of showing my work, so to speak.

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My Office Organization Project – Revisited

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Step Three: Clean off a counter. Or in this case, a small table.

Hi. It’s Saturday and I am organizing some stuff in my room today. Boy, these files are a mess. I have stuff in here that I haven’t looked at in so long that I don’t even know if it’s really relevant anymore. Bunch of stuff about Amazon. Oh yeah, here we go. Amazon. Amazon for Authors. Tell your story, reach your readers, whatever.

Let’s see, what else was funny in here? There was a lot of funny stuff in here. This is great. Yeah. Where was it? I’m looking, I’m looking. Oh, price. What they recommend for price.

“I recommend a $1.99 to $2.99 for your books. Little-known authors need to have their books at a low price to make it an easy buy for potential readers. It’s better to have 35% of $10,000 than 70% of $4,000.”

Yeah. Well, that used to be the way I operated. I figured, okay, I’m selling more at 99 cents than I am at $2.99, so I should go for that. Right?

But I’ll tell you, that did not last long. I was losing sales fast after the Amazon exclusivity thing started, and it was just a race to the bottom. Literally, I felt like I just couldn’t win at that point. I didn’t know what to do.

Oh, yeah. You can also run 99 cent sales for a week, occasionally, simply to find more readers. Whether they actually read the book or not is another thing. Yeah. Okay.

Chapter Two: Developing a Social Media Plan.

[She slams the plan to the floor with a loud THWACK!]

Yeah, that’s what I think about that. What is this here then? This is, okay, change tokens. Oh, this has something to do with something that I probably don’t care about anyway.

The BS Free Indie Author Guide. Oh yeah. This was a book I want to come out with. Maybe I’ll come out with it someday.

Copyright checklist. Now this could be useful. I might hang into this one. Yeah. When I do the copyright thing that I want to do at some point.

So yeah, I’m really trying to plow through some of the bullshit here in my files and stuff that I never, ever look at. And just get down to the brass tacks, because really when you come down to it, the thing I need to do right now is get my act together, because it is not together, I got to tell you.

So maybe that’s part of what I can do as part of the community. Talk about how to organize an office so that you can find things. I dunno. It’s just something I’m thinking about. By the way, I’m wearing my Bugs Bunny shirt today. How do you like that? Hey, Bugs Bunny, my hero! My cartoon hero! Bugs Bunny. Alright, that’s it then. Talk to you later. Be seeing you as Patrick McGoohan used to say in a certain show.