Your Author Business Plan for 2022: Advanced Self-Publishing Podcast With Orna Ross and Joanna Penn

hello everyone and happy new year and welcome to the alliance of independent authors advanced self-publishing salon with me joanna penn and orna ross hi orna hi joanna and hello everyone happy new year one and all here we are 2022 and i think we're all hoping that it will be better than last year in all the particular ways but even if you had an amazing year we can still have a better year this year so today we're talking about planning for 2022 we're going to be talking about creative and business goals but as ever before we get into it we are writers so we like to remind everyone of that and we'll also talk about what's going on so oh no what's been happening with ally well ally was closed for the holidays we we kind of broken take a break from just before christmas until today so today was our first official day of opening and you and i polished off an ai submission to the uk government again as sort of a reply to the consultation that we originally worked on last year so that kept us going and uh essentially then we're in planning mode for the next week or two looking at the year to come particularly in this first quarter and looking towards london book fair hopefully a live event and allies 10th birthday celebrations our self-publishing conference would be happening in april as well so yeah busy busy quarter coming up with one thing and another what about you well you might have noticed if you're watching the video i'm in a closet in new zealand so and we actually missed our our december session because i was in miq the quarantine here and all this lots and lots of fun which i won't go into but basically i've been in new zealand for family and obviously everyone's struggled to see family during the pandemics so uh great to have made it over here so um it's very hot so it's been a kind of yeah southern summer um but i did um put out a surprise short story a mid-winter sacrifice and it's funny because i wrote it five years ago and i haven't i didn't publish it didn't publish it didn't publish it we edited it several times and i just never felt it was right because it's a bit dark obviously a midwinter sacrifice it's not a happy christmas story but it's set at a christmas market so this year i was like well i'm in a heatwave in new zealand and this story seems very appropriate so i published it and um really happy about that and i actually put it in kindle unlimited which is not what we normally do but as a short story it just is difficult in many ways so that i'm trying that out i also put out um team of relics went live while i well after i left and that's available in lots of different formats so i feel like i had quite a difficult year but it ended with a few publications so sometimes that's the way the way it works what about um you as order ross yeah me is honor us also doing um a sort of an experiment with amazon i have i spent last year doing a lot of writing um on a book that turned into a series essentially and uh i have just hundreds of thousands literally i am not exaggerating of words waiting to be kind of knocked into shape last year i also did an experiment just for myself using social media using facebook to try and serialize a bit and and get a feeling for what serializing fiction might feel like i was doing it on a sort of a daily and weekly basis was very experimental very using my social media for me and not being very social at all but i enjoyed the accountability so now i'm going to um have a go at kindle vela and see if i can serialize this series you know to do it um in that way so that's kind of exciting i'm looking forward to doing that just approaching it in a different way and amazon has so many great tools and different ways to use things so yeah in same ways you're kind of experimenting with kdp select i'll be experimenting with that and i have a couple of poetry books now uh ready to hit um being uploaded this week to from my 12 poems to inspire series so with valentine's day coming up big big day in the poetry calendar uh love book of love poetry and then at the opposite end of the spectrum a book of bereavement poems so and both of those will go out very shortly so yeah looking forward to fantastic fiction lots of fiction and poetry this year yeah fantastic now i am already getting glitches in uh in my um session so i'm gonna stop my camera uh we might just go to audio only order might stay on the screen but i'm gonna stop my uh camera uh but we will be carrying on um so let's get into the topic um for today which is your author creative and business plan for 2022. so we the first the first thing is why is it worth spending some time planning i mean there are so many distractions and life goes on so fast and for me it's definitely about if you don't plan to achieve something it might never happen um i i am definitely someone who plans at the beginning of every year i actually i i don't really like december i love january i love making plans i've got my my my journal here next to me and i've been sort of planning it all out i like to consider what's possible uh in terms of the year and i know i pretty much won't hit everything on my list but i do like to give it a go so honor why do you think it's worth spending some time planning yeah i think planning is so important and the reason i think it's so important is because i used to do it and i got myself into a right old mess with one thing in another and so i think because we are both authors and publishers i think that's actually the key reason because they are both highly complex skills and very different skills and they require us to do all sorts of very diverse tasks and while it may be possible for somebody to do that without an actual plan in place i think it must make life much much more difficult i think i personally when i used to just use a to-do list i found it all a bit overwhelming and while i did get things done i never felt great about about things you know so for me it's as much about how you feel about it it's an inner process it just makes you feel better about everything you feel more organized be more on top of things i think without it as well you know as i said these are two important and complex skills and as you do them you're growing and you're learning all the time the indie author environment is very fast moving things keep changing and so you can actually become derailed by what is actually just the process of doing the work if you don't put plan in place i think it just all gets too hard and you don't see clearly where you're going and what you're doing yeah yeah i like to use that metaphor i know it's a sort of cliche but the the jar with the big rocks in and so if you got the jar which is your time you need to decide what the big rocks are first before you fill it all up with all the little rocks and the and the sand so if you decide what your big rocks are i mean my plans i mean we are authors so generally our plans are going to be around which books we're going to write but this is where um you know for example some new authors will say okay well this year i'm going to go from zero to finishing my first book and making a million dollars in a year and it's like if you actually sit down and plan things you can see that that might not be possible well it's very very unlikely that that is possible so having a um going through this planning process can really help so let's talk about what is a plan anyway because i think this is what stops a lot of people planning because they get they think oh it has to be some massive spreadsheet with lines and you know different colors or it has to be this big you know you see them in the shops these sort of big planners and they're like oh that just doesn't feel right for me so i think a plan is a sort of variation on the theme depending on your personality it can literally be a post-it note if you want with three major things on that you want to achieve this year um or i i like it i do like a document um i use mac so it's a pages document but it isn't very long it's still really realistically a one-pager and then we'll talk about turning it into um actions in a minute but um i definitely think it should be written down uh i always write it down i do a new year's day a blog post and podcast episode on the creative pen podcast and i do that every year and that really helps me so um what do you think a plan is yeah as you say they come in all shapes and sizes i do feel that um perhaps the less organized you are by nature the more you need and structure and a more sort of in-depth plan so for me i ha i kind of spent one year a few years ago getting to grips with what i needed in a planner because i used to try various people's planners and i found them all too mechanistic and sort of they didn't account for the fact that um author publishing is a creative business first of all and the creative businesses are you know messy and they don't go according to a one two three step sort of thing so but i use quite a structured plan now i look forward to the annual sort of and big intentions but then i break it down into um quarters and then months and then weeks and then days and literally so i know what i i'm kind of doing now and it also allows for deviation and the things coming in and you know your surprise story would find its way into the plan even into the you know the weekly plan of the monthly plan even though it wasn't planned in the yearly plan so you've got to have that sort of flexibility that's really important but for me it's quite structured and quite organized it's also important i think for a creative business that you're planning rest and play as well as work that it's not just work and that you're kind of your plan should serve you um the creative aspects of your of your work and by that i don't just mean productivity but i mean that you're actually enjoying yourself that you're engaging with your passion that you're you know that it is satisfying you i think that's really important uh aspect of planning although i if it isn't if it's making you feel stressed if it's making you feel overwhelmed if it's making you feel inadequate like you're not you're not hitting your your targets then it's time to change the plan absolutely so then and again it's always funny when we look at you and i as personalities because in in one sense i'm i sometimes feel more organized than you but in terms of planning you are so much more organized than me so it's quite interesting how we do things but i also think that comes down to the definition of plan because to me my plan is a sort of overall list of my goals so for example this year i will write um my arcane book 13 for example i don't know what that will be yet but i intend to write that and write a non-fiction book and my plan pretty much covers like that high level but then i take it down to um the kind of to-do list and the google calendar where i plot in time for tasks but i don't kind of plan necessarily when i will do those things that kind of emerges later on whereas it feels like you plan much more earlier on than i do would that be right i'm not i'm not sure that i i do a lot of the detail planning earlier on but what i do so this planning method that i kind of put together and i work with various indie authors on it so i've had a lot of feedback on it over the years as well it's important to me is that as i said it includes the work the rest and the play that that's included and also that it looks at things through the lens of money and profit so it's not just about here's what i'm going to do it's not just a to-do list it kind of it's a multi-layered plan and i agree it's it's hilarious because but i think it's because you are so just by nature you're a good planner and you've got all sorts of skills in the planning arena that i think you don't even realize you have whereas by nature i'm much more you know much less planned and i need my actual written plan needs to be more structured it needs to give me that level of support that perhaps you don't need so for me what often happens with plan and the way i have devised it is that problems and bottlenecks and kind of resistances and things that are likely to pop up for me show themselves much earlier in the process than they would if i didn't plan and that's one of its you know one of the big values in it for me so yeah it's quite structured isn't the right word but there's a lot of supports built into it right so some of the things i guess um that you can put into the plan obviously we've both talked about what you want to achieve and then um how you're going to do it i think especially if you're new to this uh obviously we you know i've been you've been writing longer than me and i've been writing for 15 years now but when i write down um write a book i don't have to necessarily break that down into how that's going to happen every month but if you're new to writing or publishing or marketing you do actually really need to break it more down so you can see that it's achievable for example with writing you will have to book an editor so you have to figure out you know am i going to write three chapters a month which you know maybe one a week or does that is that 500 day five days a week you know how am i going to actually achieve the goal and make the time because i think this is the other part of it um for example i know many of us for 2022 are planning to hopefully travel some more uh travel for holidays not just for family and maybe travel for author conferences or whatever so you know that you already bring up time as you said also rest play and family and life and most authors have a day job so where are you going to find the time to achieve the things in your plan and what another good thing is to kind of know how you're going to measure that achievement so again publishing a book is easy to measure because it's like is it live or not but are you going to just measure the fact that it is published or are you going to measure um how many books you sell or how many um emails on your email list or how much money you make and that kind of thing so the angle of your plan uh is also based on your priorities as an author and what you're focusing on each uh each year might be might be slightly different yeah exactly i think the measures is the most important thing once you know what yours and each indie author will have their own personal success definition you know what is what does success look like for them and um you know their own way of measuring that but there are also sort of key measures i think that every indie author shares and one is productivity and we're very conscious of those i think the number of words that we've written or the number of books that we've published also our platform and its growth in terms of engagement and reach and our profits i think we're not very good at thinking about and measuring that i think that's really important and profit in terms of the money that's actually paid over to you as opposed to just covering your expenses in your business and then also i think that you should have some way of measuring your own personal satisfaction in the process as you go so you know books can take it depending on the book as well and the author books can take a very long time to write a good planning method will actually map and log as you go so you're always getting a sense of the achievement you know without hitting those big milestones and you know and stressed out in between because you feel you're not going fast enough that's sort of the way a lot of indials has approached their work and it's not all that enjoyable so um yeah i think putting all that into the plan putting those measures there and mapping and logging and them as you go is really important okay cool so let's talk about the aspects of an author business plan and of course this is the advanced show so we are going to talk about what we have in our plans for the year and we're going to break it down into a couple of areas and hopefully um this will help you uh listeners your plan so we're going to break it down into writing and craft book production goals marketing goals financial goals and uh we'll we're just going to talk a little bit in about what we're planning individually in the hope that that will help you so first of all in the writing and craft area so this is definitely where you're going to put the books and the stories you're going to write and that might be under different pen names in different genres and as ever it might proliferate over your career so hilariously i wrote down i did write down some very ambitious goals for this year but the fact is for the first time ever and you might find this interesting honor i also have about 200 000 words of drafts across about six different projects and that is something i've never really done before i think i i definitely had some um problems in 2021 that stopped me doing a lot of things uh covert being one of them but um i have a lot of books that i need to wrangle into into publishable work so i will definitely do one non-fiction but i have three works in progress like actual drafts i'm going to do at least one novel and i also want to do short stories every month because i've got to this point where i feel like there's so many ideas backed up in my brain that short stories might be the way to get rid of some of them and just move them out of my brain i feel like when ideas back up too much that they start no i don't want to use the word block but i feel like they you know they're sort of backed up and if i release them then that will help um bring in whatever's next in our life is a bit woo-woo but i don't know what do you think about that honor and what is your what are your writing and craft goals i completely agree with all that i'm fascinated that you find yourself in this place because you know i had a tough year a few years ago and i ended up opening up so many projects that i still haven't fully closed down at all and so yeah that's really interesting to me that you found yourself in the same place because i always think of you as the great finisher and you you used to always finish one project before starting the next and i wonder is it connected to you know when when things are a bit challenging that maybe we find comfort in new projects and then when we're feeling a little bit stronger conditions are better for whatever set of reasons then we're able to to get them across the line in terms of them tripping over each other i agree you know it's not quite that they block and the other but the progress can feel very stalled if you're going from one to the next to the next to the next you're not really getting that sense of satisfaction of taking the thing across the line into finished done and dusted kind of thing so it can feel like you're blocked even though you may well be quite productive so this is why measuring i think is really good so that we're not just relying on on um those big milestones so yeah um for me the way i managed to kind of make it all integrate and hang together is that i don't think about writing and publishing anymore i think i am about three things because i find that whenever you have a binary like writing and publishing it can become a bit antagonistic and you know one against the other or you know you hear a lot of also saying for example i love writing but i don't like marketing you know so when we when we put two things down very often it polarizes things for me it was really helpful a few years ago to split my work into maker manager and marketeer and so i have kind of stuck with that and i've offered that to a lot of other indie authors who have found it useful as well and that really moves me along because i think sometimes the managerial work you know where we're looking at our process and our profits and all that kind of stuff it's very easy to overlook that and not not plan for it and not realize how much time it can take for example and then also you know when it comes to something like social media updates or advertising and lots of other things we have to make those before we can actually put them out there so putting those in onto the maker hat can make me realize that sometimes you know writing time is being consumed by making and these kinds of things that are really actually the marketeer will then go off and use them in social media or wherever but the maker has to make them in the first place so breaking it up in that way was something that was really kind of useful for me but would it would okay so if you're calling it maker then what what are your goals in the maker category for this year for this year so my main focus is going to be that fiction so it's getting started on the vela which is kind of like your short stories in a way except it's one theme one topic one long series but each one will be a shorter more discreet such a piece of work with its own you know climax and and so on so i really would love to see four of those through by the end of the year so one a quarter that's kind of my aim for that and then um i will be publishing another these two poetry books at the beginning of the year and i'll do another two at the end of the year and that's my they're my publishing goals and so i'm much more my writing this year will be last year was all about getting the words done out and this year it'll be about editing and i'm getting getting stuff over to the editor and getting them getting them finished and through so they're in various stages of undress some of it is quite finished and some of it is quite raw and so so that's kind of what i'm looking at i'm also looking at audiobooks i have my first fiction audio books coming in february and hope to get more books into audio this year as well and i did my first licensing deal last at the end of last year um yeah so i hope to do um two boar this year is kind of what i put into the plan so we'll see how that goes um well i do like to separate things into the writing and then the book production and publishing and so under the publishing um i am okay so again this we haven't i haven't talked we haven't talked properly about this kind of stuff for a while but i am going back to the back list of um my arcane books so for every you know this is the advanced show everyone knows when you're an advanced author that if you have books in a series then that is your best chance for making more money as a fiction author like it's sort of 101 if people like your series they're going to buy more books and i'm a very different writer now than i was when i wrote those first few arcane books and so i am actually going back and re-editing um the first three at least and i'm i'm in stone of fire at the moment and it's kind of i'm so glad i'm doing it and the thing is the the reviews have been great the reviews have stayed really good but i just feel like for people to if you read book 12 you'd be like this is a this might be a different author so i'm one of my goals this year as a better publisher is to kind of re-update that backlist and so that is more it is more worth in terms of marketing doing paid ads on that series in the hope that it will um by picking up my pacing and all the things i've learned since with the craft i'm actually gonna make it um have better sell through so that's one of my goals isn't kind of the publishing slash marketing but also as you've mentioned audio i record my own audio books so i'll be recording some more i'm also hopefully gonna have my voice um turned into an ai voice and licensed that in 2022 that is on the cards now um so but i will make it very clear whether it is human joe or ai joe reading things so i think that's interesting i'm also updating book descriptions so i'm kind of trying to make more of my backlist as well as creating new books as well fantastic i think it's really useful as well when we're thinking about those marketing goals for the year to think in terms of you know splitting out marketing and promotion in terms of thinking about marketing as all those things you're talking about the updating the metadata the descriptions you know all of those are really important and can make a huge difference um and they're really important important but promotion is something slightly different where you actually you know have a campaign where you decide you're going to go out on one particular title and you know do an ad campaign or whatever on that particular and title so sometimes i think authors can get the marketing and the promotion mix them all together and it can seem like just this never ending wave of tasks and to to both think about the positioning of the book in the marketplace the covers the descriptions you know there's a lot to think about at that level but that in and of itself is not going to shift a lot of books it just is it's almost like the basic you have to have in place and every few years as you become better writer a better publisher you're going to do those upgrades but promotion is something separate and needs to be planned out in a separate way i think no you're absolutely right and i i think it's interesting like the promotion ad campaigns you know i tend to focus promoting that first book in series for fiction and uh you know you can make more money on a bigger series so that's why i'm taking my sort of big biggest marketing goal is clearing this up and improving my sell through but that is a kind of bigger marketing goal and then of course as you mentioned i will be doing campaigns with the new books and i have lots of things going on for marketing in general but maybe our overarching tip here is that the goal setting is more about almost taking it back it's trying to simplify it to what is the most important thing because as you said all these tasks they can all seem out of control and there's it never does end i mean that's the nature of life until it ends uh but it's almost like well what's my main focus so obviously we are creating new work but um you know like for example book talk you know tick tock book talk on tick tock i'm like i am not going anywhere near that stuff i'm just not doing it now maybe some of you are really interested in tiktok or maybe using it already but um i'm not into video i i'm just don't have the bandwidth to do another social media and so that's not something i am going to do so included in my plan is what i don't do and that is one of them or um for example i've you know pretty much taken professional speaking off my plan entirely apart from the bits i'll do with ally and um some other online stuff but like taking things off your plan can also really help and that's why writing it down will make it clearer because you can write down all the things you want to do and then realize that there's absolutely no way you can possibly do everything what do you think absolutely i mean as part of of the go created planning method there's a page on it's called the let go list and it's as well as you know striking stuff off your over ambitious goal list for the year the other thing to do is to look at what you're doing already and what is serving you well and what isn't so if you've been putting a lot of time energy money or effort into something and it's not going particularly well shake it up do something different drop it you don't have to do social media sometimes writers ask you know do i have to do social media well yeah the answer is no you don't have to but you have to do something you have to decide if you're not going to do social media how you're going to let people know that you exist and let people know that your books exist and if you are going to do social media you're much better off to focus on one and do it really really well and it should be something that you enjoy um and not you know something that you're doing because you think you have to do it i see a lot of indie authors doing social media in a sort of um you know a duty-bound way and it doesn't it's not actually selling books so if it isn't working for you and i i do accept that there isn't a lateral line you know i do my social media today and i sell more books tomorrow it's not like that but nonetheless you get a sense of whether you're getting engaged when you're getting responses and if you're not it's not working so you need to change it and sometimes the best and easiest change is to just draw a line through it just stop doing it and go and do something else instead that you enjoy better yeah absolutely um i have pulled back and pulled back from social media in general i i especially like when it turns a bit doom scrolly but you know toxic twitter so i i've definitely pulled back a lot and uh it it it's it is about your mental health as well i mean all if you as you say if you're feeling i i think uh that emotion how you feel about something is really important so for example you know we both podcast and i love podcasting i find it creative i find it you know my audience hopefully find it useful your audience do um you know that there are things that we love and that we settle on and then there are things that we might have to do but you can't sustain it for the long term unless you find a way to enjoy it so um just on on podcasting there uh i uh have obviously i'm continuing with my creative pen podcast we're continuing with this podcast um for for another year i hope we haven't discussed it but i presume we are yes yes we are and um so you know that's and that but to me this podcasting is brilliant marketing because it's partly content marketing it's partly it provides useful things for people it also can provide an income stream it's long term it's on multi-platform it's all these things that i feel um sort of turn one thing into multiple things and uh whereas to me i i just haven't found that same feeling of contentment i guess with social media but again we're not saying that this has to be the thing that works for you it just try and tap into that feeling of yes i really enjoy this like mark leslie the fave um you know friend of ours co-writer with me on the relaxed author he loves videos he spends his fun time like with his uh fiance making parody videos and putting them on tik tok of songs and things i'm like like that's fun for them so mark loves tiktok but you know that's something for him and not for me so think about that are you doing something just because other authors found it worked um or is it something that you're happy to sustain sorry karen sorry and i was just going to say on that because i think it's also important um to watch out for mental noise you know you mentioned the the mental health question there and i think a huge amount of over busyness in the head is not conducive to your best creative work so the more you can streamline and simplify and focus in on one key thing that works whatever it might be and the the better simplifying is something that we i think should be in our plan every year um right let's talk about financial goals because i do think this is important this the the advanced show we are running author businesses and uh well again this helps you be realistic so one if you have been running an author business last year then you can at least write down what happened last year so you're looking at your income you're looking at your expenses and some of your plan is um you know do i how can i increase my income that's often a goal but it doesn't have to be and i think that's really important too um but also do i need to reduce my expenses and are there things i'm paying for like often we sign up for recurring things every month and then we end up not using them or we do need to sign up for something that is a monthly thing or an annual thing in order to save us time elsewhere so there are definitely tools that are super useful um you know and then things like um for example i found that last year i didn't actually spend so much money on paid advertising as i probably should be as an author at my level with the number of books i have and so actually one of my goals this year is to get more into paid ads because they are something that clearly do work when you have a bigger backlist so that's something i am looking at kind of expanding um so that's slightly different but for example i know also that potentially i could expand my business by let's say publishing other people's books but that is not something i want to do so i'm not willing to expand my business in that way doing something i don't want to do so it's not just expanding for the sake of expanding it's really looking at how do i want my life to look how does my author business work where does my money come from do i want to carry on with that revenue stream and that expense um stream for example so and also to think realistically you are unlikely to make you know a million dollars in revenue some authors do but many authors don't i'm not one of them in a year but something like the 20 books to 50k um sort of it's a group obviously but i like the 20 books to 50k number because i certainly found that with 20 books i was making 50k and i know a lot of authors that's worked for so that's the type of interesting goal but again that can take a number of years to get to so orner what do you think about the financial goals yes i think um back again to your measures i think you know this measure should be in there and definitely you should as an indie author as we say that's the advanced show you should be um including profit in your measure and balancing it with that pleasure thing so that's where you when you look at it through the two lenses of you know of passion and profit then you immediately know what you want to eliminate and what you want to focus on and i think another thing that's really important for indie authors to think about is planning around value rather than the cost you know so i hear a lot of us is talking about the cost of this or that it's too expensive say a course or a and so it's interesting you know that you are taking on the advertising now at this point because you understand that your return on investment now that you have the right number of books in place is more likely to to take the box and so return on investment is what we should actually be planning around not how much something actually costs you could spend a lot more money and make a lot more money by doing that and i'm always saying this and i'm sure some of the listeners have heard me say it before but if we were in any other business it would cost us an awful lot more just to do business the costs of doing business for us are really quite low so in terms of planning what will yield the best results for us very often in the us think too small they need to to stretch themselves and and look at it through the return it's likely to deliver rather than the actual cost of it right okay so that's some of the categories and whether you want to call it maker manager and marketeer or as i do kind of break it down into sort of more functional i come out of business consulting so i work in these functional categories but it's whatever works for you and your your goals so let's um round up with how can you make sure you keep focusing on your plan so i'll talk about what i do so first of all i um i just have time with myself in my calendar so i i diarise i use google calendar i use it for pretty much everything and you know if owner and i are just going to have a chat we have a you know we put that in the calendar um everything is in my google calendar so that works and i make a date with myself for writing and then i use that time for writing or podcasting or whatever i organize my days and my months and my years in google calendar so that's one thing then i also have a i use my kind of to-do list slash external brain is things the things app and it is mac only so but there are loads of these different tools you have to find what works for you but in things i actually have uh some kind of tracking things like um a task that i'm just opening up right now it says uh you know what what is my daily writing my daily log for example what what am i working on right now and then it also has a sort of overarching to do and that's my top project at the moment so for me it's re-editing stoner fire i've booked an editor for that so it cut that kind of keeps me focused on the next task in the list which might sort of correspond to owner's more detailed planning but essentially i don't use my plan for that i use other tools for that and then i have my weekly podcast which on a monday the creative pen podcast where i always talk about my personal uh writing situation and publishing and all of that and i feel very accountable to my audience how can i say anything in the author's space unless i am at least working on some kind of writing so uh also this is my full-time job so i have to do that and my i do look at my accounting my xero i use xero xcro.com for my accounting i look at that every day so i am aware of the money going in and out of my business and because i sell direct i get a lot of income every day as well as expenses every day so those are some of the things that i do to stay focused on uh on the plan what about you anna yeah so like you i feel very accountable to to other people and um i think that's what happens you know once um you you've succeeded to some degree other people hold you accountable um but when you're starting off or when you haven't got to that point or if you're selling on other platforms where you may not be as aware of your audience as say i would be in in ally or with you know patrons or um through social media um i think it's really important that you hold yourself accountable that you find some way in which you can make that happen for yourself so um i also as well as and feeling you know being very aware of the people who are kind of waiting for the work and writing to you about when is the next book coming and all that kind of stuff and i run a go creative in business facebook group and we track our sort of at the beginning we map at the beginning of the week we map our week's um intentions and then at the end of the week kind of log what actually happened and that's um really useful i find i also use social media to make me accountable sometimes um instagram at the moment i write my poems first on instagram and i have a i have a um an identifiable kind of sequence there and i need to to keep it fed i need to keep writing poems basically or the whole page grinds to a halt so that kind of works for me as well and then just measuring i only do money twice a month and that's enough for me i do it on the fifth and the twentieth of the month i allocate my percentages across to the various accounts and i just kind of keep keep a check on what's coming in and what's going out and so you know it's so different for everybody i think that's the important thing and it doesn't really matter what you do or how you do it and it evolves anyway as you change and as your business grows and as things become more complex you'll need different things so for example now for ally because we've got a big team and lots of different things happening at lots of different levels i i use um asana because that works best there but for myself for my own writing and the smaller sort of um publication team that i have from horner ross publications i just use evernote for that so yeah different tools for different situations and for different people at different points of development in their business i think yeah absolutely so hopefully that's given you a few ideas and i've put this quote here at the bottom of our notes by annie dillard which says how we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives and as writers as i mean i i always come back to this quote because sometimes you know if a week goes past and i'm like busy with all the admin or the metadata or the this that and all the pro even the podcasting which to me is creative it's still to me my creative body of work my writing is uh the most important thing so that's why sort of tracking well if you're not reaching your goals on a sort of you know quarterly basis if you're reviewing your list and going okay i haven't done anything well then how are you spending your days uh which is of course how you spend your life so do you need to reallocate some of your time into the writing or the publishing or the marketing or whatever so come i guess make your plans hold them lightly and keep revisiting but of course life happens such as such is the way it goes and of course orner mentioned her go creative plan i also have your author business plan which is a book and also has a workbook um anything else you want to mention no i think that that's it on planning um oh yes i do have at the end of the year there's usually a sort of a graduation of of some people i do have a patron program around this planning method if anybody is is interested in that they can just drop me a line at info ornaross.com and i can let you have more details of that fantastic right well next month we are talking about the changing market for audio books we're going to be talking about subscription models and also ai narration which is just moving really fast and there's a lot of interesting things going on and we're both experimenting with some of that so whatever your thoughts on these topics we will be trying to cover the pros and cons and the opportunities for indie authors as the world of audio just keeps on growing and growing doesn't it it sure does it's really really interesting and it's not going to stop any time soon so yeah i'm looking forward to that one so we'll just pop back on the camera and give you a wave hello bye it's very yeah goodbye i'm so weird to do this without the video but i hope that you guys found it useful and i guess all that remains to say is uh happy writing yes and happy publishing have a great 2022 and keep us posted we'd love to hear about your plans indeed see you next time bye bye now

2022-01-09 13:36

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