Welcome back to Austen Promises and the Writer’s Journal!
I hesitated to write this post. It took a lot of thought and a little persuasion from a friend to do it. I’ll tell you why after I share my goals.
One of my goals is to advertise more. I have applied to KOBO for a couple of their promotions, and I have a couple Amazon ads already running. I will add more Amazon ads, that’s a certainty. I also hope to be chosen for the KOBO promotions I have applied for, and to run at least one per month. I’m going to push other platforms hard, because, as I think I have said before, I don’t want to rely on one retailer to earn all my money from. I want to grow non-Amazon sales, and the best way to do that is to advertise on those sites. I’m going to look into promoting my books on iTunes, as well.
Another goal is to get my website up and running. Currently, I have a blog, though I did upgrade it, thanks in part to my Patreon patrons and in part due to a Black Friday web hosting sale. 🙂
A third goal is to increase traffic to my Gumroad store. I am currently running a 50% off sale with a coupon code and traffic is the highest it’s ever been. With traffic will come, hopefully, sales.
My main writing goal this year is to write a lot of books. This is the part I hesitated to share. Now that I have proven to myself via my NaNo participation that I can still write a novel in a month, I intend to do it every month for the rest of my life. So, my writing goal for 2018 is to write ten to twelve books. Now, to explain why I hesitated to share this part.
One of the criticisms of prolific writers is that they’re not good enough. “She should have taken more time to write it.” “It feels rushed, because she’s so prolific.” And my favorite: “You can’t write a good book in less than <insert favorite time period—a year, six months, a decade, etc.>”
Perhaps, if I were trying to write literary fiction, like Jodi Picoult or Margaret Atwood, then yes, a novel a month might be too fast. Then again, it’s not like I write them and no one sees the rough drafts. I have readers, and I have to edit just as much as anyone else does. My purpose, as I have stated ad nauseam, is to entertain people. I’m not out to win awards.
In order to put out a novel of 50,000 words, I have to write a minimum of 1,667 words a day. Some days, like Sundays, I can’t. My new word tracker allows me to weight some days more than others, and I have to. Sundays count as 25%. However, that makes my minimum number of required daily words to rise. Currently, it’s at around 1,870 words per day for the rest of the month, because I have not only had to count a few days as less, I didn’t make the minimum amount for several days.
Writing those 1,870 words might also take four or five hours, depending on how needy the dogs are. Now that it’s winter and we are getting snowed in (as I write this, we’re expected to get ten inches of snow in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours,) they need my attention more because they can’t—or won’t—go outside for long. Feel free to imagine the look on my face, brow raised and one eye practically squinting, as I give the younger dog the evil eye while I wrote that last sentence. 😉 So, it’s not like I’m cranking out 10,000 words a day and my novels are epic. I work hard for every word written, and some days they come vvvveerrryyy ssssslllloooowwwwlllllyyyy.
Still, I know I can do it; I received verification that I can during NaNo, and I intend to do it. Who knows, maybe I will challenge myself to write longer novels in a month. 🙂
Come back next Wednesday for another peek into my journal! <3
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