I had told TheHoarseWhisperer earlier that I'd talk a bit about my workflow but hadn't had time till now.
So I'll just jump right in.
I can't really help much as far as drawing in pencil goes. That's really just something you have to work at over time.
But, the more you do it the faster you get. That's pretty important if this is how you work. I draw a lot. Sometimes just practice drawings that I have no intention of using. Sometimes though those drawings do get used. Paloket and Tol'Imen were like that. I was just practicing.

Once I have a drawing I scan it in. I usually mess around with the levels at this stage to try to make sure the light pencil lines will show.
I would rather the paper look a little dark than have light pencil lines not showing. If the paper gets scanned a bit dark I will clean all of that up first in PS.
At this point I often do this stage - I will duplicate the pencil layer. We'll call those layer1 and layer2. On layer2 I will change the layer blend to multiply. I may or may not change the opacity.
From here I start doing color layers. I usually start with big base layers that I can use as quick selection areas using ctrl+left click on the layer thumbnail. That can really help speed things up. Also, when working within a selection I usually hide the selection edge. To do that, go to View - Show - and uncheck selection edges. It makes it nicer to work without seeing that selection edge.

In order of layers, water layers are always at the bottom. I often do a base color layer for water and then a second and maybe third layer over that. The second layer will often be set to multiply and will be dark. The third will be set to overlay or soft light and will be light highlights and such.
It is like this for the next sets of layers. Next is main basic land color. Then Grass, Trees, and last hills/mountains.
For more recent maps I have been doing shadow and highlight layers as well, for the shadows of the mountains and such.

When working this way, almost every layer is set to something other than normal, as normal is opaque and I need these layers to still show the under drawing.
Eventhough I have the top layer as drawing layer 2 set to multiply. It probably sounds strange and convoluted but that's how I work.

I do it this way because it gives me a lot of control, options and non-destructive ways to get to a color/texture that I like. And if I need to change something later it isn't so difficult to do.
As an example, Paloket [minus the text layers] had 10 layers. Shab'Ra'Tan had 15 layers. Frosthaven had 16 layers, though it could have had about 4-5 less layers. Sometimes I will do line work for different areas of a piece on different layers. That's if the drawing requires more line work.

Well, that was pretty long-winded. Not sure if that's useful to anyone but there it is.