One book, many ways: how I used Writion to launch it
It's easy to be distracted when you are combining writing with everyday things like work and family. How do you fit in your book around all the other things. One of the things I do is utilising Writion's series to manage a single project, in this case a children's book I've written. By leaning in to the different tools that are within Writion I can get the best out of it. I love knowing that everything is easily accessible and I know exactly where I am within that project.The book I'm referring to is Gran's Magic and the Midgetagoo, a children's book I published myself. Writing it was great fun and my first readying to a room of children and their parents went better than I expected. However a book is only going to get read if people know it exists. This is where I embraced Writion, I know I'm bias, I built Writion but I wanted something that I could use as a writer. Let me explain how with this book I organised everything that came after the book was published — the visits, the readers, the promotion, the dozen small threads that all pointed back at one little book. That's the second part Writion carried. What follows is genuinely how I used it, feature by feature, around a single title. One book, and a whole handful of methods. Pull out of this what you want to use for your own books, commissions or assignments.
The book
Everything started with the first click of the + New Project and then choosing Book for your project. That's how easy it was setting up Gran's Magic and the Midgetagoo. The Project is was the hub — the thing every other piece of work around the book refers back to. I moved the book along its stages, kept my notes and documents against it, and tracked its costs and any income in its own Accounting tab, so I could see plainly what the book was costing me and whether I was getting anywhere near even.
That mattered more than I expected, because once you self-publish, the book stops being a single task and becomes the centre of a small campaign. Having it sit there as one clear project meant that no matter how many other threads I started, there was always one place that was simply "the book".
Advance readers, before it went out
Before I asked the wider world to buy it, I wanted real readers to read it and, honestly, to tell me the truth. Sadly when I printed the book I hadn't built Writion so I missed out on one feature that I would uses with my next book I publish. That is the Launch Team a place where I will manage my advance readers — the people reading early for feedback and, later, for reviews.
Think how easy it is, instead of a muddle of emails and a mental note of who I'd sent what, each reader sits on a proper roster: which provides you with things like who they were, what stage they were at, whether I'd sent them a copy, and whether their feedback or review had come back. For a book you've published yourself, those early readers are precious — they're your first reviews and your first word-of-mouth — and keeping track of them properly means nobody slipped through the cracks and no thank-you gets forgotten.
The author events — school and library visits
A children's book lives in schools and libraries. Each visits becomes real work in its own right. I did my first round of library and early childhood visits without Writion travelling from the Hawke's Bay to Auckland. What a difference having Author Events makes.
Now each visits has its own place to live within Author Events. Here its easy for me to plan and because it gives suggestions about what items I need to complete the stress levels around these visits is greatly reduced. If you have ever done one of these you know there is a lot to do from contacting the school or library, sorting dates, what you needed to take, how the session would run. Setting each visit up separately means I'm not holding a term's worth of appearances in my head, and where a visit comes with a fee, I can invoice it from the same place rather than chasing it later.
These visits aren't a side-show to my books; they are what the book's life out in the world is all about. Treating them as proper projects, not diary scribbles, is what let me say yes to more of them without the whole thing tipping into chaos.
The calendar that holds it all
My Calendar within Writion definitely earns its place not just for Gran's Magic and the Midgetagoo but for all my writing projects.. Every visit had a date, and every date landed on one calendar — alongside the book's own milestones and everything else I have on. Planning a run of school and library visits is exactly the kind of thing that goes wrong in your head and never on paper, and having them all on a single screen meant I can see a busy fortnight coming and plan around it instead of being ambushed by it.
"What have I actually committed to, and when" stopped being a question I answered from memory. It was just there.
The promotion — assignments to publishers and competitions
To get the book noticed, you need to get the word out to the world. With most of the books I've written I pitched and write a set of promotional articles aimed at various publishing businesses, newspapers and magazines. I even been known to entered a couple of competitions, although no prizes. Each of these was an Assignment — the project type built for commissioned and submitted writing — so each had its own path from pitch through to submitted and, where it landed, published, with the relevant contact attached and any fee or entry tracked.
Because these pieces all pointed at the same book, I kept them grouped together rather than scattered across my dashboard — which is exactly what Writion's series grouping is for: several pieces of the same kind of work, gathered under one name so you can see them as one push instead of a dozen loose ends. It turned "a scatter of promo I keep half-losing track of" into a tidy, visible campaign.
The online push — my website and beyond
Alongside the print and the pitching, I promoted the book online — through my own website and other online channels. Those became Online projects, each moving from idea through drafted, edited and scheduled to published, so I always knew what was written, what was still to come, and what had already gone out.
It's a small thing, but knowing at a glance which posts were done and which were still owed is the difference between a promotion that keeps its momentum and one that quietly stalls because you lost the thread.
One book, held together
None of these were grand or complicated on their own. A book project, some advance readers, a handful of visits, a few articles, some online posts. But that's exactly the point: on their own they're manageable, and all at once, in your head, they're the thing that quietly eats the time you meant to spend writing.
Putting them into Writion didn't make more work — it gave the work somewhere to live. One book at the centre, and every method around it visible, dated and accounted for. And through all of it, Writion never once needed to read a word of the actual book. Its job was everything around the writing, so the writing could stay mine.
That's the whole idea, and this is me living it: one small children's book, and a genuinely multi-method way of getting it out into the world without losing my mind — or my afternoons — in the process.
*Want the mechanics behind this? See how a project works in Writion, or a day in the life of a freelance writer using Writion. Ready to try it with your own book? [Start free](https://writion.co.nz/