Writer and Kung Fu Fighter
My original goal was to read 25 books in 2022.
I ended up reading, or listening, to 48 books!
I think I’ll up my goal from 25 to 30 for 2023. I’d love to say I’ll have time to get to 50, but in 2022 I had back surgery and was down a lot more than usual. I know that contributed to the total count.
My hope is no more surgeries (crossing fingers).
What are your goals for 2023?
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!
October turned out to be a wild and crazy month.
Last month I mentioned a new project I was working on. For that project, I wrote two novels in October. Two 50k word novels. One is back from my editor and the other is just back from my beta readers.
I’ll tell you a little secret. They’re sweet, uplifting romance novels that I’m going to release under a pen name. If you get my newsletter you already know this, so I guess it’s not that big of a secret. I’ll be announcing the release of both books here before the end of the year.
If you’re wondering what they’re about, let’s just say that they could pretty much be Hallmark Christmas movies, but I couldn’t bring myself to cram quite that many cheesy lines into one novel. And believe me, I really tried with the second one.
I was considering writing another romance novel, but instead decided to start on my Academy series. I’ve now got outlines for stories about The Beast and a Frog Princess. You’ll love the take on the Beast, and I was seriously laughing when I was working on the Frog Princess. I also have the other five characters picked and their stories loosely laid out. Watch for these starting at the end of January.
I try to focus on the positives, but I feel like I should share some of my less than stellar experiences from this past quarter.
Marketing gives me anxiety. Well, after an hour of thinking about it and/or learning about it I want to punch people in the face. I guess that’s a form of anxiety, yes? Or maybe just stress. Or maybe I just need to take a chill pill.
Anyway, I haven’t met my monetary goal this year because I haven’t been marketing. I do have a newsletter with about 2500 subscribers, and that’s been fun. And I’ve put out a two novels and three novellas along with a boxed set for Jagged Scars.
However, I’ve failed miserably in my half-hearted attempts to learn Amazon and Facebooks ads. Everything I’ve read points to the fact that you must advertise so your books get in front of the right readers so then the readers can buy them, love them and then buy all of your books. This is the plan. My execution has been lacking.
So things aren’t all roses and rainbows, but things are going forward. Forward in a surprising direction, mind you, but forward all the same.
Check back next month for my first sweet romance novel, along with an update about my Academy stories!
Ah, July, my old nemesis. You did not get the best of me! Well, mostly not. I mean, I got a few things accomplished. Despite all your efforts to thwart me.
I knew July was going to be tough going in. Between family stuff, holidays, vacations and some community service that I do every July, I only had something like fourteen writing days to work with. Considering twenty or so is the usual amount, I started out in a bad spot.
Still, I got some things done. I didn’t get other things done. Thus it is in the life of Author Jo.
Stay tuned this month (or early next month) for a few things:Don’t forget, Fractured Sea is on pre-order for $0.99 until the release date of August 31st.
