Year One as a Full-Time Author
I made what I thought were easily attainable goals for this year. I imagined having more time than I would know what to do with and being able to do all the things.
Yeah, that crashed and burned early on.
Here’s a snapshot of my 2018 goals:
Make 20k-25k
Jagged Scars Series Finished
New Sight Series Finished
Sci-Fi series written and out
Babes in Spyland revamped
Flash Fiction Weekly
Blog Weekly
Master Amazon Ads
Master Facebook Ads
Have 10k subscribers on my newsletter
Get 50 people on my review team
Doesn’t sound hard, right? Let’s go through what got finished, what didn’t and why.
Make 20k-25k
This did not happen. The reason it didn’t happen is because I never took the plunge into advertising. One month I did some paid promotions and my sales skyrocketed for a couple of months, then plunged back down to normal levels, which is selling a book or two a day most days.
Jagged Scars Series Finished
This did happen!
However, writing the last book of the series consumed most of the first half of the year. I let it get under my skin, wrote the whole thing about three times and finally came up with an acceptable book. Writing it is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done, including finishing my first book.
New Sight Series Finished
This happened! This happened in time for Salt Lake FanX (a ComiCon-like convention) where I actually sold out of books.
Happy to say that writing the final book of this series only gave me a migraine for two weeks. Nothing like the end of the other series.
Sci-Fi series written and out
This did not happen. I started outlining and planning and working through character arcs, and then my romance writing friend called me, and I ended up writing three sweet romances instead of these books.
The romances are doing well, and I’ll get back to this series early next year.
Babes in Spyland revamped
So I want to revise what I’ve written in this universe and then expand it! I have so many ideas, and it will be amazing, but it keeps getting pushed back. This might happen near the end of next year. We’ll see.
Flash Fiction Weekly
I only missed two weeks of this! And both of those are because of finishing book deadlines. This has been a fun activity. I’m thinking I’ll mix it up next year, but we’ll see. There will still be Flash Fiction!
Blog Weekly
Did this. I know blogs aren’t really a big thing anymore, but I kind of like blogging each week. I plan to continue.
Master Amazon Ads
Ugh. This caused me way too much stress, and I hardly did anything. I’ve enlisted the help of my mathy hubby, and we’re hitting this hard at the beginning of the year.
Master Facebook Ads
Same as Amazon Ads
Have 10k subscribers on my newsletter
Maybe this was too ambitious. I’ve more than doubled my subscribers and now have 2,500. But nowhere near 10k. Everything about this changed with the EU’s privacy thing in the middle of the year, and I haven’t been particularly diligent about it since then.
Get 50 people on my review team
I started a review team, so that’s good. I think I have 30 or so, and of them only about 10 are super active, but still, going forward.
What else came up?
Karly Stratford:
Well, I created my pen name of Karly Stratford and released two sweet romance books. The third will be finished before the end of the year and released in February. I don’t want to put my whole focus there, but it is fun getting out of my usual genres and doing something different. I really want to lean these toward clean romantic comedies. Should be good times.
Fairy Tale Academy:
A friend asked me if I wanted to contribute to a Little Mermaid retelling collection in May. I was struggling with my Jagged Scars final book, and took the opportunity to write something different. It’s only 24k and I had a great time with it.
I wrote it with the intention of it being a stand-alone, but a few of my beta readers asked if there is more in the world. Well, now there will be. I have two more written and a total of eight planned. Those will be out between January and May of next year.
Overall impressions of the year:
If I’m being brutally honest, being my own boss was much more difficult than I imagined. I can’t tell you how many days my schedule broke down and I didn’t get much, if any, writing done. Family and friends pulled me away more often than not. I got bored being at home by myself. Sometimes I played on Facebook more than I wrote.
I have a plan to fix these issues. I’ve been using it for a week, and I’m really liking it.
I know I can do more than I did this year. I know I can be a better author, a better business owner and a better marketer. More on my plans for that next week!
