How to Set Your 2020 Writing Goals
Have you set your 2020 writing goals yet? I know we’re coming to the end of January, but it’s not too late! And because it is the start of a brand new decade, you can also take the opportunity to set goals for the next ten years.
What’s Your Dream?
What do you want to achieve in your writing life in the next year – or decade? What is your dream? Do you want to become a published author, or is your dream to give up your day job and make a living as a writer? If you already have a few books published, perhaps you are ready to put a figure on what your income from books looks like in a year, five years’ time or by 2030?
Write down your Dream, however crazy and far-fetched it sounds. This is your Goal.
Display it on your office wall, or make a pretty image out of it and use it as your wallpaper on your computer. Put it anywhere where you can see it.
If you don’t have a goal, how will you achieve your Dream?
My Goal for 2020-2030 is to make a good living out of books alone. This means a six-figure profit from my writing. A tall order, but one I believe I can achieve.
Achieving Your Goal
Now you know your Goal and know what you really want to achieve in the next few years, you need to put some flesh on the bones of that Dream. You need to build a Strategy for your Goal.
Strategy
Write More Books
Whether your dream is to write more books or finish your current manuscript, or to make more money out of your creative work, finding more time to write is essential.
To achieve this, first, take a look at your schedule. Make sure you have set time aside in your diary for writing and then keep to this schedule. Even if you sit at your computer, doing nothing but stare at your screen, make sure you do this. Turn off all social media, email alerts, and any other distractions. This is the time you have given yourself to reach that goal, the Dream that you really want to come true. You will not achieve it unless you take action. And in this case, the action is to write. So do as Hemingway has reportedly urged ‘Apply the seat of your pants to the seat of the chair’ and write. Eventually, you will write something good.
Look at how long it takes you to write a book and set a goal for the next year or ten years.
Increase Your Sales
Publishing new books regularly is a good way to increase your income, but if you already have some titles out there, have a look at how much they have made so far. Could you increase the sales figure?
Use Your Backlist
Making the most of your backlist is an important part of making a living as a writer. In her hugely inspiring book, Productivity For Authors, Joanna Penn talks about the various products a book can be turned into.
Most authors publish their books in Ebook and paperback format, but you can increase your income by adding products such as large print, audio, workbooks (for nonfiction), translation into other languages, film and TV rights and much more.
Part of my strategy for 2020-2030 is to publish workbooks for my two nonfiction titles and sell translation rights for my backlist. Earlier this month, I signed my first translation rights contract with a Turkish publisher. Perseus Publishing is going to publish all of The Nordic Heart series of books as well as The Red King of Helsinki and Write Your Story: Turn Your Life into Fiction in 10 Easy Steps.
You can also make sure your books are marketed effectively internationally through both Amazon and other retailers such as Kobo, iBooks, GooglePlay and Barnes & Noble. The decision to ‘Go Wide’ and leave the Amazon exclusivity program is a difficult one but can bring positive results (I wrote a recent post about it here for more information).
My personal experience is a positive one. My sales grew by 30% last year, mainly because my books were available in all the above-mentioned sites, in addition to Amazon. The chart above shows my book sales in 2019, divided between the different ebook stores.
The chart below shows my sales on Kobo all around the world. Pretty cool, eh?
Look at how many other products you could turn your backlist into and add these to your strategic goals.
Increase Your Mailing List
You don’t have a mailing list? Now is the time to start one. Direct mailing to your readers is still the best way to increase sales and to ensure the launch of your title is a successful one. There are many gurus out there to show you how to set up and increase your email list. What it boils down to is this:
Use a service such as MailerLite or MailChimp to set up a mailing list and link it to your website.
Have a free book, a novella, short story, extra, unseen chapter, or just a PDF about your character to give away to new sign-ups to your list.
Sign up to a service such as BookFunnel to easily set up a landing page and to manage the process of giving away the free offer and to signing-up process. (You need to link to your mailing list service provider.)
Set up automated emails to new sign-ups and let them know about you as a writer and your books. If possible, give them a link to another freebie or a book offer that is exclusive to them.
Make sure the tone of your emails is the same as your fiction or nonfiction.
Write a regular newsletter monthly, weekly or daily.
Display your free ‘Reader Magnet’ clearly on your website as a pop-up or banner (or both) and post about it regularly on your social media channels.
Sign up to Newsletter swaps with authors in your genre (never out of your genre) or promotions. I am having quite a lot of success with BookFunnel newsletter promotions at the moment. I’m taking part in one every few weeks and my list is growing by about 200 readers per month.
Set a sensible goal for the growth of your email list and add this to your strategic goals.
Website and Social Media
There’s no doubt that a good website and a presence on social media will increase book sales. There are also opportunities to engage with your readers and other writers in your genre, which is good if you’d like to do newsletter swaps or write guest posts for other websites.
Social media is, however, hugely time-consuming.
Again, there is a lot of advice online about what social media platform is the best one for writers, and how to increase your followers on each one. The best advice I have come across, especially if you are just starting out, is to concentrate on the one that appeals to you most. Getting a good following and engagement on one platform can have a huge impact on your writing business, but beware the time suck. Writing is always the most profitable way to use your limited time resources, especially if you only have one or two books published.
But if you are keen to increase your social media, and want to do it, for example, to connect with other writers, this is what I would do:
Choose one platform, ideally one that you enjoy using and where you already have a presence.
Having said that, Facebook is a good one to start off with. It’s best to set up a business page with your writer name and brand (ie. reflecting you as a writer, thinking of your book’s genre, your writing style, and your characters)
Learn what works on your chosen platform and follow those rules
Do not just promote your books, or free offers, but also engage. I’ve heard that a good ratio between marketing posts and others is 20/80. In other words, 80% of your posts should be about your cat and 20% about your books. I think this varies amongst the different social media platforms, but be aware that if you post just about your books, your following will suffer.
Set your social media goals, such as the number of followers on each platform, the number of posts per month, week or day in your strategic goals.
Networking
Us writers spend most of our days staring at our computers so just for health reasons it’s good to get out to meet other writers and readers. Of course, you can do this via social media too, or joining such organizations as the Alliance of Independent Authors. There are also many meet-ups for writers, or you can join a writing group.
Look out for small literary festivals too. Although again time-consuming, they can be inspirational and even profitable for book sales. I am pleased to be appearing at the next Hawkesbury Upton Literary Festival, run by an author friend, Debbie Young.
Last year, I appeared on two podcasts and at a Nordic Noir panel at High Barnet Library, through a Danish author who I’d met at another Nordic Literature event, where we were interviewed about writing in another language. I got that ‘gig’ via a Finnish contact who I’d got to know through my previous job and kept in contact with afterwards.
Connecting with your fellow authors who share your interests is useful for the exchange of ideas, moral support as well as for promoting your website, blog–and, yes, your books. Many writers now also run podcasts, or write blogs, and are always on the look-out for guests. Getting yourself out there will increase your visibility and chances of being asked for a blog or podcast, or to appear as a guest at an event.
Set out your networking goals: are you going to join an organization or meet-up this year?
Advertising and Promotion
Sadly, the only way we are going to make the best-seller lists nowadays is to advertise our books. When I started self-publishing some ten years ago, just having an Ebook out there was enough to bring in sales. Especially if you’d done your homework on keywords and book categories on Amazon.
You still need to make sure your metadata is correct and up to date, but now you also need to do some advertising. Unless you only have one book published. If so, your most important goal of the decade is to write more books. So if this is you, look away now.
If, however, you have more than one, or ideally, two books out, and especially if they are in a series, or closely aligned, you can achieve increased sales with advertising.
Mastering Amazon advertising should be your main focus, as these ads can be a very low-cost way to find out whether your books can be profitable. Sadly, not all books will ever be profitable, but then your Goal might be just to publish your work. There’s nothing wrong with that.
If you find that your Amazon adverts work, I’d move into Facebook ads, especially if you have a good following on your Facebook Author Page, as you can use lookalike audiences to define your target group.
In order to increase your readership around book launch time, it’s also a good idea to use email promotion services such as BookBub, BargainBooksy, FussyLibrarian, or EbookNewsToday. There is a list of these sites in the Alliance of Independent Authors site, as well as on Reedsy, which runs a list of services for authors.
For other kinds of promotion, there are Blog Tours, which are useful when launching your book for increased visibility and for gaining reviews. There are also a plethora of review sites, but I’d be careful. The only one I have used is Netgalley, but again you can find lists of these services on ALLi and Reedsy.
I am going to write a more detailed post on Advertising soon, so join my Self Publishing Tips newsletter so that you won’t miss it! (See below)
Set out your marketing strategy using the recommendations above.
Tactics
Once you have your Goal and your Strategic Goals, you need to set out the Tactics for how you are going to achieve these goals. As with writing more, your diary is your friend when it comes to tactics. But before you start blocking out slots in your diary, have a little look at the strategic goals you have set for each of the headings:
How many books are you going to write?
How are you going to increase your sales?
Backlist
Mailing List
Social Media
Networking
Advertising
On each of the strategic goals set a list of tasks. For example for Mailing List set out the tasks as follows:
Choose a mailing list service
Link it to your website.
Choose or write a free book, a novella, short story, extra, unseen chapter, or just a PDF about your character to give away to new sign-ups to your list.
Sign up to a service such as BookFunnel to easily set up a landing page and to manage the process of giving away the free offer.
Link this to your mailing list service provider.
Set up automated emails to new sign-ups and let them know about yourself and your books. If possible, give them a link to another freebie or a book offer that is exclusive to them.
Decide on the tone of your emails.
Add your free ‘Reader Magnet’ to your website as a pop-up or banner.
Post or schedule posts about your free offer on your social media channels.
Sign up to Newsletter swaps with authors in your genre (never out of your genre), or promotions.
Set up a newsletter schedule with topics, book offers and so on
This is just an example of how a Strategic goal can be divided into tactical tasks. You can drill down deeper (and if I were you, I’d do that) and then add the tasks to your diary or a to-do list.
There are many pieces of software for effective time management, so choose one that works for you, whether its an app on your phone or a notebook planner. A wall diary is a very effective way to remind you of your schedule for your writing goals, but any diary you use should be the main focus of your 2020 Strategy.
Don’t forget to revisit your Dream Goal, Strategic Goals, and Tactics at every opportunity. Note down your achievements daily or weekly. This will give you the energy to carry on with your Goal in the coming months and years. And it’ll motivate you to apply that backside to your writing chair!
Let me know in the comments what your Goal is. It’s often good to say it out loud or tell someone else – talking about your Dream often makes it come true! (Why do you think I told you my Goal?)
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