The 2014 Master Writer Plan Part 1: Process & Publication

By divine intervention I came across an action plan for promoting indie books and developing a platform. It was a hallelujah moment for me. This was the thing I've been looking for! These were the questions I needed to ask myself! Finally! Someone had put together some actionable steps for me to pursue one by one in order to get the word out about my beloved creations!

As you may have guessed, my strong suit is promotion. :-D

So of course I devoured the information and quickly realized it raised more questions than it answered.

Not only did I realize how lacking my knowledge was of social media campaigns, I also realized how incredibly scatter-shot and scatterbrained my attempts had been. I was operating with the whole, "throw everything at it and something will stick" mentality. I've known I needed to change my approach, but I just wasn't sure how to go about doing it.

Well, I started going through the questions this site asked. Then I asked more questions of myself. Then I brainstormed. Then I asked other people these questions. Then I brainstormed some more. Then I prioritized based on expected ease and projected impact of these various actions. Then I made a list.

All along I said I wanted to publish 7 more books this year (and pretty much every year after as long as I am writing) but I wasn't sure how I could do it. While there are specific actionable parts of promotion that need to be thought through, I also needed to get clear about how I could break down my word counts in the time left of this year in order to reach my goal.

As my husband says, each new book promotes every previous book. That's the beauty of having a collection published.

In an effort to ensure my success with my publishing goal (and subsequent promo overhaul) I needed to make sure my word counts were reasonable and that I was giving myself enough time to edit, proof, format, and publish each manuscript.

I needed to not only break down things into daily goals, but also weekly and monthly across the different aspects of publishing (cover design etc).

The result is the following:

• Monthly word count goal: 31,000 words
• Weekly word count goal: 7350 words
• Daily word count goal: 1050 words
• Monthly editing goal: 1 book
• Monthly publishing goal: 1 book
• Monthly cover goal: 1 cover

There will likely be a lag at the beginning which will stretch through the year because of the process of writing and publishing (i.e. March will not have a publishing goal and December won't have a word count goal).

These are separate from any promotion work I do - including blog posts, Twitter, Facebook, videos, podcasts, etc. I'm not exactly sure how the promotion goals are going to fit into my days because I'm not exactly sure how much time I want to devote to each thing and what those things will be. I think initially there's going to be a lot of time spent on cleaning things up (which will be a real pain and may take the place of some of the other writing/publishing goals in various months).

I plan to detail my efforts in my publishing goal for 2014 as well as my promotional goals. I hope others will find the process enlightening and helpful, especially for those who were/are as clueless as I have been. That said, I'd better get writing!