I’ll be the first to acknowledge my willingness to write about the newsletter I send to my email list. In fact, I know I’ve done it more than once.
Back in February, I offered readers of this blog a “sneak peek” at the quarterly newsletter—the joke being that it wasn’t really a sneak peek, since I’d sent it to my subscribers the previous day. I guess my sly method of enrolling more people to my list wasn’t so sly after all.
A few months before that, I also posted about the newsletter. However, I entitled the post Got Those Old Indie Author Newsletter Blues, as I felt a bit melancholy about my (perfectly logical) decision to reduce the newsletter’s frequency from monthly to quarterly.
About That Whole Deadline Thing
My rationale for changing the frequency was that I don’t always have “author news” every month, and my blues had more to do with the lack of protest from subscribers than anything else. I hadn’t expected anyone to cry, “No, Mike, we need to hear from you monthly!” Still, it was a small blow to the ego.
Now, I’ve always published the newsletter on the 6th of the month. I don’t even recall picking that day for a particular reason, though it’s worth noting that my birthday is November 6th. (I like chocolate. You can send all packages to P.O. Box 46506…) And I don’t think I’ve ever published the newsletter late, though it’s certainly easier to write them four times a year rather than twelve.
I’m the kind of writer who works well under pressure, and though I actually have missed deadlines before, they were never my fault.
That sounds bad. I know. Allow me to explain.
Back in the day, I had a job where projects periodically came to me on a last-minute basis. Sometimes, my client would fail to provide any of the information I needed to write their article, even as the deadline loomed. I missed a few of those deadlines, for the simple reason that creating a working draft of an article with zero source material was not feasible. My client, in those cases, missed their deadline, which meant the goal posts of my deadline had to be moved.
But The Newsletter Is Different…Right?
All this to say that I missed my own self-imposed deadline this past weekend.
Although it’s much easier to write only four newsletters per year, I still forgot about my newsletter this weekend. Completely.
It’s even on my iCal: Quarterly newsletter out. Still, I forgot.
This past weekend consisted of grocery shopping, laundry, and errands—not the most glamorous of excuses, but there you have it.
I don’t know that my subscribers will notice the difference, as it is, after all, now quarterly…unless you, reading this, are a subscriber. In that case: sorry.
But I’ll send it late. And that, my friends, is how I missed my own, self-imposed deadline.
Ever miss a deadline? Got a story about it? Feel free to share in the comments below.
