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Hello Lovelies, and welcome back to the blog.
It’s a new quarter, which means it’s time to set some new goals, so let’s jump straight in.
Here we are back at the Kanban-style Trello Board. If you’ve been here a while, you’ll already be familiar with this, but for those that aren’t, I use Trello as a digital sort of Kanban board. I still have categories for my tasks, but I don’t use the “to do, doing, done” modifiers. They all just stay on their lists and I modify the cards within them with checklist tasks that are small and actionable. In other words, either I complete them or I don’t.
I’ve already talked about my yearly goals in another post, so let’s jump right in and you’ll see how my quarterly goals match up with the goals I set at the beginning of the year.
Writing
I had Write WiB Draft 1 on my list from last quarter, but upon looking back at my yearly goal setting post, I’m not sure why I did. I must have misread my own notes when I set the Q1 goals because I didn’t originally plan on tackling writing this until Q2. I feel a lot better knowing that my actual plan was spot on.
I was going to give myself the entire quarter to focus on writing this draft because it’s the first time attempting a zero draft, the story has significantly changed, the voice and genre and tone have significantly changed, and because it is now being written in first person instead of third person, which I’ve never done before. I’m tackling a lot of new things so I wanted to give myself time to do that without feeling crunched.
Thank you past self for knowing future me well enough to know exactly how long it’d take me and exactly what I’d need.
Business
I am still in the query trenches, submitting Utopian Melody for agent representation. I have not submitted to nearly enough people yet. I’ve done Pitch Wars on Twitter several times and have submitted only about 25 queries other than that. Last quarter I got in 11 total submissions. It kind of burns me out to get back rejections so if I can get a number of submissions out all at once before the rejections come in, that’s usually what I do. It’s a new quarter, so I’m aiming for 5 more this quarter than last.
I also still need to find an accountant. I am so bad at tracking business-related finances. I’m funding everything with my own full-time job income. Every time I need to pay for my PO box, website fees, Dropbox fees, program things like Scrivener, I pay for that out of my own pocket since my “business” – writing books – isn’t making money yet. But because my “business” isn’t making any money on it’s own I usually let the bookkeeping part slide since I don’t really want to see how much money I’m losing on a fairly regular basis in just trying to support my passion when it isn’t going somewhere.
That doesn’t make it unimportant to do though, right? Eventually the business should be able to both sustain itself and pay me back the money I’ve “loaned” it over these years. I’ve been procrastinating adding yet another expense to the business before I’m under contract with anything. I do, however, need to know who I want to use for accounting once I’m looking at contracts so that I can be ready. This is me trying to convince myself for yet another quarter that I need to do something I don’t want to do.
Marketing
I am going to continue to write weekly blog posts. Because I am insane, I also started a weekly podcast out of the blue last quarter, and now have those to keep up with too.
Meet Edgar is the social media marketing tool that I use to schedule my posts. I need to make some updates right now to some of the posts but I don’t quite have tangible goals for that just yet. I’ve learned some things about making better, more engaging posts, but it really comes down to me going through posts that I already have scheduled and redoing them one by one.
Email marketing has been falling by the wayside. I have been mulling over trying to better this area of my marketing because honestly, once most of the posts are set up, you don’t have to redo them. So I’m going to try to write some sort of welcome email sequence and get that set up this quarter. I have no idea what I’m doing with most email marketing so every little bit takes me forever to figure out. Even a monthly newsletter is a struggle. Every month I get back into the website and I’m 100% lost on how to send a newsletter out to the 7 people on my list and I’m searching the help docs again.
Travel, Training, Meetings
For no reason at all, I completely spaced my monthly local writing group meetings last quarter. I was pretty bummed but things picked up at work and I somehow just lost track of entire weeks and missed them. I’m going to try harder to get to my meetings this quarter because I always feel more inspired.
I am also going to go to my state writing conference in June. I have to get tickets for that still. It’s a purchase I almost have enough money saved up for, but I am super excited because it is being held in a town only 30 minutes away from where I live so I don’t even have to get a hotel room. They have pitch sessions and everything and I am so excited that I might have the chance to go to it this year when I haven’t been able to in years past.
Have you set goals for Q2 yet? What are they? Let us all know in the comments below, and we can keep each other accountable!
