Are you ready for Xmas?

Kitty is not yet ready for Xmas.

A friend of mine posted on Facebook that she just saw Christmas lights being put up at her local shopping mall (guess Halloween and Thanksgiving got cancelled). And while it makes me freak out, years of management tells me that it makes sense from the viewpoint of the shopping mall.

First, Halloween and Thanksgiving are not big retail holidays.

Second, this year has really sucked been slow for retail stores.

Third, most retail stores depend upon Christmas to put themselves in the black for the year. (Yes, your average retail store in mostly in the red for most of the year--it brings a whole new level of meaning to the term "black friday.")

Now, as writers, one would think that we would be above such things. No. No. No.

Today on Smashwords, I was reading Mark Coker's suggestions for when to get stuff into the system if we want to have our ebooks available in various outlets (Apple, etc.). And honestly, I thought he was being optimistic (his estimate assumes that everything goes correctly--I have been having lag times under another pen-name for Apple and Barnes & Noble to get my stuff into their systems).

Coming from the print market as I do, where you submitted your stuff like nine months before the holiday, I came up with my own deadline for the material that I want in the sytem before the Christmas shopping rush.

That deadline? Oh, it is Halloween. I figure that given the amount of stuff outside of my control that the only way that I can be sure that my stuff is up for sale by the start of the Christmas rush (which having done retail means the day after Thanksgiving) is to get it in before the end of the month.

I figure that anything that I do after the end of October may or may not get into the distribution network. And besides, I plan on doing the NaNoWriMo again this year, so that is additional reason for me to aim for Halloween as my Xmas deadline.

Not that I depend upon the Christmas rush to make my year...it is just that some extra sales would be nice to have, given the fact that I am about to have student loan payments about to start being due.