I’ve never tried doing a mid-year review before. I’d make goals, and they’d disappear before the end of January. Out of sight. Out of mind.
This year is different. As they say, “there’s a first time for everything.” This is it for me. Apparently.
If you’re a long-time reader, you’re probably well aware of my tendency to bite off more than I can chew, so to hopefully avoid setting HUGE goals, only to fail at them spectacularly, I’m starting small. Simple.
I may or may not adjust these goals as the year marches on, but here’s where they lie at the time of this writing:
GOAL: Build my backlist of available stories
ACTION: Write daily, publish monthly
GOAL: Inbound marketing (for my non-fiction client side)
ACTION: 1 LinkedIn article weekly, 5 posts/images, etc. weekly, 3 comments per day
GOAL: Find more readers and connect with more writers on Substack
ACTION: 1 weekly newsletter,
1 note per day, 3 replies/shares per day
Small, but they feel doable, which is key to getting them done.
New for me this year is using the bullet journal method of planning. If you’ve ever used it, I’d love to hear what you think!
I love all of the different spreads that people on “the tubes” show, but I HAVE TO keep it simple; otherwise it won’t work for me.
I need small baby steps, and a BUJO feels like it will at least make me not feel guilty about a planner with dozens of unused pages.
Or is that just me?
As for Wordplay? It’s not going anywhere, but to be honest, I haven’t given it much thought. I do hope to post on Wordplay every week, so I’m adding it to my BUJO right now so it’s not lost in the weeds.
Now that you see what I’d planned…here’s how it’s going:
Write daily, publish monthly? I’ve been doing the writing pretty much…at least more than before. But I have 3 stories that need to be published…this is the bottleneck in my process that I need to address.
Inbound marketing? Umm…no. Not a fan of LinkedIn, to be honest, so it just sits there. Doing nothing for me. However, I need to bite the bullet and get some content done. I guess. Sigh.
1 Weekly Newsletter? For the most part. I’ve missed some weeks, but I am still trying to be more consistent. And I need to be more consistent with notes.
Yes. I can honestly say that I use this tool every weekday. It has helped me stay on task, and I like the fact that I can go back to see what I’ve done over the months. I do, however, need to be more consistent with writing notes about what happened during the day.
Bottom line, the BUJO works for me.
Try as I might, I keep trying to write more short stories, but they keep growing on me until they’re novella-length stories. And, to make it more difficult for my marketing person (a/k/a me), they’re in different genres.
I’m trying to brand myself as a cozy mystery writer, probably cozy sci-fi/paranormal/anything weird, but my creative voice isn’t cooperating. So, I’ll just follow her around and see where we end up.
If I can’t write in the same world or the same genre, I suppose I’ll just have more marketing work to do.
Recently, I opted to serialize my novella Poseidon Awakens in Wordplay. Here’s a link to the first one if you missed it.
I also plan to publish it on all the major platforms; I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I plan to keep working on my goals as I’ve created them. Because these goals are based on things within my control, I see no reason to change.
I do, however, need to avoid the shiny object syndrome of “free” webinars showing how to do ads, Kickstarter, email marketing, all the stuff, lol.
That said, I do, however, plan to add another goal… improve my author website. Right now, it’s just a blog with the same stuff I post here.
I want to change the theme, add a shop where readers can buy my books directly from me, and link it to a formal email newsletter using Kit. I’ll still post here, of course, but I need to build on my own “land.”
However, anytime I’ve worked on my website, I tend to go down a ton of rabbit holes trying to get it to look the way I want, but I promised myself that “good enough” should be my goal.
I can always tweak things later.
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