Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

When it comes to year-end lists, I'm a happy addict. My husband jokes, "You have lists for your lists." He's right! I get a charge out of reading and putting into action those 10 Ways to Declutter Your House or 9 Steps to a Better Budget . As one year comes to an end, I like taking stock and seeing what needs to be accomplished in the next one. Not all of the goals are achieved, or achieved in the timeframe I want, but life's a journey. Plans need tinkering. This year my usual ambitious perspective veered off course. A different kind of change came. The favorite "Holiday Adventure List" would be no more (not all my lists are task oriented...some are loaded with fun). Every summer, Christmas, and Spring Break for the last 14 years, our family made lists of places we wanted to explore and things we wanted to do. The ritual started when my boys were young. We made plans to visit a certain animal at the zoo or go to a bookstore. There were...

I admit: I’m a list-maker. No matter whether my plan for the day reaches to five things or fifty, I feel like I’ve made progress just by writing everything down. Image: Money Saving Mom As you might expect, this organizational tendency extends to my writing career. Before my first historical romance was published in 2011, I made a four-month bucket list of goals and reported back on them every month . Four career goals (ranging from corralling my TBR pile to a regular word count) and four personal goals (for example, keep plants alive). Since then, my TBR pile has grown and I’ve killed a cactus. Er. Nobody’s perfect. At the end of the year, lots of people start thinking of resolutions or goals for the coming year. As various family members gathered for the holidays, I polled them on what they wanted most for 2014. Mr. R’s goal for the new year: “to weigh no more at the end of it than I do at the beginning of it.” Brother R’...

By Danielle Jackson I don’t think I’m alone if I say that once you work in publishing, procrastination goes out the window. There’s literally no time to even think about procrastinating. As many of you know, publishing is a HUGE group effort—from our copy editors to our designers to our web team to our authors, it takes a lot of people to make one book… and Sourcebooks publishes around 300 books a year! Just think about what would happen if ONE person were to push things aside and put even the smallest kink in the process… Luckily, we’re pretty efficient over here at Sourcebooks (and that’s not to say that there haven’t been issues with late books or cover re-designs at the last minute), and even when something does have to be arranged differently, we stay flexible to make the proper changes. However, I do find small ways to procrastinate, in ways that won’t be detrimental to our publishing machine (which is wild and crazy and generally makes no sense): -I won’t answer a...