creative and business goals for 2022
Here we are, three days away from the new year. I don't recall having set new year goals pertaining to writing and publishing, but I'm learning that it helps to set an intention and goals for this duration, as that provides a direction in which to proceed.
So here are my creative and business goals for 2022.
- Creative Goals
(1) Write 1,000 words per day on a daily basis.
I have not been able to manage a daily writing streak so far. And I find myself falling into self-doubt quickly when I end up spending time on the other aspects of indie-publishing at the expense of writing time.
We are writers after all, and unless I write more, I will be limited in what I have to offer to the market.
1,000 words per day is a reasonable goal at this stage. It requires two 30-minute writing sprints, and if I can get those in before the day begins, I'd be happy.
(2) Editing, cover design, and publishing for 1 hour/day.
As and when I finish a draft, I'd like to spend this hour working on editing it, designing a cover, and putting it up on the various retailer platforms for sale.
I am sitting on a few written but unedited drafts right now, and this is beginning to weigh me down. Unless I put those works out for public consumption, I'm pretty much operating in the void, which in turn dampens my enthusiasm for writing.
So it's rather a vicious cycle, one that can be avoided by putting the works out there almost at the pace at which I can produce them rather than letting them pile up into a backlog that would become difficult to tackle later on.
(3) Work on #talesfordreamers and #Instapoetry.
I'm going to work on these ad hoc but maintain my production rate equal to the publication rate, i.e., I'm aiming to write 1 #talesfordreamers and 7 #Instapoems every week.
My estimate is this would take 2-3 hours, or perhaps even less, spread over the week.
(4) Take Becca Syme's course on Strengths for Writers
Becca Syme has been great in debunking several myths of the writing and publishing process. She's been the one to consistenly say that the same trick does not work for everyone, and that we need to determine our strengths and work according to those, rather than trying to do something others are pursuing in the hope of achieving similar success even if it is totally not aligned with who we are and how we function.
I am definitely interested in learning what my strengths are and how to utilize them well.
This year (2021), I took Dean Wesley Smith's Critical Voice Workshop that has been incredibly useful in getting me to the writing computer more often than before.
I am way less critical of my work now, even though on occasion I slip up and castigate myself both for words written and those not written. But I'm able to catch myself doing that more often than I could before, and that helps me get out of my own way when it comes to writing.
So this year, it's going to be Becca Syme's course.
I am still learning a lot of craft as I go but I find that writing and practising more is the best way to learn my craft, and without that practice, any amount of intellectual knowledge will remain just that – unutilized knowledge. I will write more on this later, but definitely in 2022 I don't plan to pay for a craft course or a book on the craft of writing.
- Business Goals
(1) Publish wide
Right now, my books are primarily on Amazon. One of them is on Kobo. One of them is only in eBook format.
As I write and publish more, I'm aiming to put my works on more platforms. Apple, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, and so on. I'm still debating between going direct on these major platforms versus utilizing D2D for some of these as well as for other smaller platforms. So this is definitely a big focus area for me this year.
(2) Start sending out a monthly newsletter.
This is something I've been working on behind the scenes and I hope to have the first newsletter out in March.
(3) Submit to Writers of the Future contest every quarter.
I'm sure to be writing short stories, so it would be a good thing to send them as an entry to this contest and see how they fare. Submitting one story a quarter is not effort- or time-intensive, so I can do this.
(4) Submit 1 new short story every two months to leading speculative fiction magazines.
As speculative fiction magazines are good paying markets and having a story published by them would help more readers find my work, I'll aim to submit a new short story every two months to the top leading magazines in speculative fiction.
(5) Explore StoryOrigin in July 2022.
StoryOrigin seems to be a good way to attract a new audience, so assuming I've built a bit of inventory in the first half of the year, I will focus on exploring StoryOrigin during the second half of the year.
So there, these are my goals for 2022. Noting them down like these makes them feel more manageable and achievable rather than some abstract vision with no clear way to achieve them.
Do you have any writing and/or publishing goals? Please feel free to share them and maybe we can keep each other accountable!
Good luck to me and you for the year ahead!
Image Attribution: Photo by Moritz Knöringer on Unsplash