Today, I sent an email with six Calls-To-Action to my Prose on Fire email list.

I know better.

Common knowledge is that you should only send ONE CTA in your email. I’ll sometimes break the rule with two, and if we’re really busy, I’ll share three.

So you can probably guess how much of a shit show of things to do I’m in right now.

Here are the six CTAs we’re sending on today:

1. Our new blog posts and this behind-the-scenes launch series. You can access the first post at any time by going to proseonfire.com/launch
2. We’re running a giveaway to our email list this week (mostly to get attention). It ends today, so there’s a reminder for that.
3. We have a review drive going to boost the # of reviews on each of the old books in our Prose on Fire series. There are a few purposes to it:
   • get more reviews (obvs)
   • get recent reviews (I can’t prove this, but new reviews triggers something in the email system at Amazon, giving new life to an old release)
   • have recent reviews for submitting deals to advertising sites (yes, sometimes these things matter)
4. We have a $0.99 sale on all four Prose on Fire books until Oct. 25th. You can see them at proseonfire.com/ghfs. We’re doing this for a few reasons:
   • We’re starting to slowly improve our Author Rank on the books leading into all the new stuff we have coming up
   • We want people to buy and read the books, as these are critical actions that almost all of our street team members, launch team members, Finish Your First Book students, and mastermind members take FIRST. It’s a critical front-end part of our sales funnel (I can explain this in detail in a later post if people are interested, just comment below to let me know)
   • We want to improve the individual book ranks; we know that when they hit the front page of a subcategory called Authorship, they tend to stick and stay there for awhile.
5. The first three lessons for Finish Your First Book are up in a sample. Our students LOVE these lessons, and we know they’ll be helpful to our whole audience and people will get a lot out of them. Also, we would love to move anyone on the fence, off the fence. These lessons will either repel people or make them eager to get into the course and do more. You can grab the lessons at proseonfire.com/3lessons.
6. We are doing our 8×8 challenge live again. We start October 24th (next Monday) and all you have to do is 8 minutes of writing for 8 days. If you’re interested, you can sign up here: http://proseonfire.com/8×8

Whew!

(Sidenote: If you have read the Prose on Fire books and would like to review them, links are here:

• 8-Minute Writing Habit review link (only 3 reviews from 100!): http://proseonfire.com/pof8
• Dictate Your Book review link (107 reviews! Woot!): http://proseonfire.com/pofd
• Write Better, Faster review link (13 to go until we hit 100): http://proseonfire.com/pof1
• Nail Your Story review link (8 left! Our goal is 40 total): http://proseonfire.com/pofnys
• The Writing Productivity Bundle review link (27 reviews! We made the goal :)): http://proseonfire.com/wpb-review

)

In looking at our list of CTAs, I realize that some of these notifications are at the tail end (like the giveaway, the review drive, the 8×8 Challenge) and some of them are at the beginning (so we’ll be reminding people for the next few weeks about them). This has created the perfect storm of promoting way too much at once, and I’m not sure how I feel about it.

I worry that we’re promoting too much because we’re doing too much, and maybe not as effectively as we should be. Because here are all the things we haven’t even started sharing yet:

• We have a larger and very cool Kingsumo giveaway coming out toward the end of the week
• We’re hosting some #NaNoWriMo stuff on Twitter and have a few other efforts to bring people participating during November into our world (this is very long-game, obviously)
• We are launching all of our books in print in the next few weeks
• We are building some more FYFB freebies to teach people why they might be interested in the course
• In 2017, we are doing some virtual workshops, some in-person events, and a summit (!!!) that we haven’t even started talking about yet

This is in addition to our regularly scheduled programming, which includes creating and running the Finish Your First Book course and sending daily #LetYourBookFlow emails.

And of course, I haven’t talked much about the upcoming Prose on Fire books, Prosperous Creation and Accelerated Author.

I also have a long list of clean-up and marketing to do for Waters Dark and Deep, which I need to get into an Asana project today.

So, our “ruckusing” is well on its way. We will definitely sell some Prose on Fire books, and we’ll get ourselves in a good position to:

• grow our list and expand our audience
• launch the Waters Dark and Deep series
• launch the new Prose on Fire books
• recruit for some of the backend funnel stuff we’re doing (the course, the mastermind, the in-person events, etc.)

But I think there’s the problem with trying to make a ruckus—it’s a lot of work just to get some traction. (We’re not even going “all out” because we literally don’t have time.)

It troubles me because I spent most of this year learning how to stop working so much, but I can feel myself falling back into a workaholic pattern, even if it’s only for this short time or “busy period.”

I don’t sense that I’ll get stuck here, by any means. I’ve taken this “shadow walk” before and learned how to crawl up and out of it when needed.

However, I do wonder if it’s possible to really “work to live” in this business. Maybe for most of the year. But not for the next few months.

In the next post, I’ll share my marketing plan for Waters Dark and Deep. My big question is, though, will it be enough?