Floating about aimlessly in the world of writer and author is not an effective way to build a career. One cannot simply say, “Whatever happens will happen,” because then nothing will, in fact, happen.
I know. I used to be that writer.
I thought making goals and holding myself to them meant that I absolutely had to do them, that there was no room for steering in a different direction if I so decided I needed a different focus. I thought that marking down “eight rough draft manuscripts” on a year’s calendar meant I absolutely had to do them or I was a failure. Goals felt like a cage rather than a wide open door.
And then I realized that goals are not set-in-stone things but more guideposts-along-the-road things. Which meant that if I didn’t make goals at all, I was not going anywhere. I existed like that for a while, blogging on a book that I’ve released recently, but I wasn’t really going anywhere. I didn’t have any direction. I didn’t have clear-cut goals. I didn’t have much vision beyond this one small thing.
So now, every year, I spend the last week of the old year and the first week of the new year making a plan, listing out all my goals, piecing together my time, because as a parent writer there is a limited amount of it. I estimate how long it will take me to do certain projects, and I map out the year. I have a direction, and that doesn’t mean my direction can’t change somewhere along the way, but it means that I have a framework for what my year will look like. How I move around within that framework is entirely up to me.
I make word count goals. I make novel goals. I make goals for everything I need to learn (and there are so many things), and I make goals for how many books I’ll read and what types of books I’ll read and what each month will hopefully teach me. I make goals for how I’d like to see my business grow and what sorts of things I’d like to streamline and how I can possibly reach all of my goals. I set goals for goals. I have direction. I have a plan. I have the velocity that will move my career forward.
Sometimes it can feel like making these goals will only set us up for disappointment if we can’t, for some reason or another, meet them by the year’s end. I like to shoot high in my goals (I overshot my last book release by about 20 copies—it didn’t do as well as I had hoped it would), but that doesn’t mean I’ve failed if I don’t actually meet them. Any progress toward goals is a win. If we are constantly working toward our goals, we can’t help but move forward in our career.
If we want to move forward in our writing career, we’re going to have to lay out some goals. Because goals give us direction, which gives us focus.
A writer without focus will be lost in the great, fathomless sea of What Should I Write.
What goals do for us as writers is they help us analyze where it is we want to go in our writing career. When we say we want to deliver eight rough draft manuscripts at the end of a year, we know that we’re going to have to schedule out the time it will take to get them done. If we only say that we’ll write however many rough drafts we may get around to, we’re probably not going to write any of them.
Making goals concrete can help us plan out our year and schedule deadlines so that we have the best chance of achieving all it is we want to achieve. Each goal can then have tangible steps, and we can break them down as far as we want to (this might be harder for the not-planners among us), with action steps for each month and each week and each day.
If goals change halfway through the year because another opportunity plops in our lap, that’s okay. There’s nothing written in stone that says we have to do what we originally said we’d do. We can massage our goals at any point, if we find it takes us longer to write those rough drafts than we originally planned, or if another book comes knocking, insisting that this is the right time for it to be written. Those things happen. What goals do is provide a framework of intention around our year. We are less likely to drift off-shore if we have a framework for our year.
In addition to goals every year, I choose a word for my business. This has its roots in my family’s practice of choosing a word that provides the framework for our year (this year’s family word is Play. Such a great one. We are even going to explore how to play in our work.).
My business word for this year is actually two words: Forward motion.
This phrase means a lot to me. For a while I’ve been feeling like I’m standing still, like there is nothing much happening, like I’ve done all I can and I can do nothing more, and now I have to wait for people to come and get me. But that’s not really true. There are thousands of little tweaks I can make to my content and my web pages and my blog that would make all of them more effective, and this year that’s what I’m going to be working on in between my writing times. I’ve also got a manuscript out with an agent that’s been out with her for months now, and I’m going to get it back out there in the next few weeks. I have more manuscripts to pitch, and I’m ready to move forward in the traditional publishing game. Not only that, but I’ll be self-publishing some fiction I’ve been working on for a year now.
Regardless of all that, everything I do this year that is geared toward my business will be analyzed through those words: Forward motion. If I don’t think a particular activity is going to result in forward motion, then it’s not going to make my list of things to do.
There are so many things we can do out there as writers. There are social media platforms we need to make appearances on, and there are responsibilities we have for blogging, and we can get caught up in it all. And then we find that we’ve gotten so far from the time we had to write that we have absolutely nothing left. I don’t want to be there. I want to be moving forward, not standing still.
My top three learning goals are:
1. Photography—so I can offer better pictures of my own on all of my blog platforms and social media pages.
2. Using social media well—this has been a goal for a while. I’ve slowly been making progress.
3. Graphic design basics—I rely a whole lot on my husband for graphic design, and he’s a busy man. So I’d like to learn more about the basics so I can do social media posts that are graphically pleasing. I will NOT, however, be attempting book cover design. Ever.
My biggest goal this year is to grow my business without sacrificing my family.
Other goals include:
Turning all rough draft manuscripts into final drafts (there are eight roughs right now)
Sending at least 10 manuscripts out to agents this year
Doing slight revisions on final manuscripts (there are three finals right now that need slight work)
Writing rough drafts for nine manuscripts
Turning three blog collections into books
Releasing the first season of Fairendale (kid-lit fantasy)
Releasing a free brainstorming course for This Writer Life
Starting a weekly humor show for Crash Test Parents
Writing a 365 days of poetry book
I don’t know if I’ll get around to every single one of these goals, but everything I do will be done with these goals in mind.
If you’re struggling with making your own business goals for your writing career, here are some suggestions to get you started.
1. Decide what it is you want to do most in your career this year.
Do you want to write books? Learn more about something? Publish a book? In order to start making tangible goals, you first have to know what it is you want to do in the first place. List all the things you want to do, and know that you probably won’t be able to get to them all. Rank them in order of importance and then build a plan around them.
2. Pick between one and three things you’d like to learn.
One of the best things we can do for our writing career is to learn something new. It can be about the craft of writing. It can be about writing headlines or effective blogs. It can be about the business of writing or the psychology of influencing people or how to brand yourself. It can be learning more about social media and how to have an effective presence on your handles. There is always an abundance of new things we can learn if we’re intentional about them.
3. Adjust your schedule according to what your top goals are.
I would suggest only having between three and four overarching goals. I have several more than that because I’m an overachiever, but that’s not really ideal. (You can also increase the number of goals as you get to know yourself. I’ve been writing full-time now for a year, so I know what my weekly production is like. That helps me make even more specific goals.) On the other hand, sometimes having a goal that seems way out there in the realm of impossibility is just enough motivation to help us almost make it. Don’t be afraid of large, seemingly impossible goals. If we write it down, we’re more likely to reach it.
4. Share your goals with someone else.
One of the most helpful things we can do for ourselves when we are setting goals is to share them with someone else. It creates accountability, and some of us need a whole lot of accountability. My husband and I always talk about our business goals, not only because we work really closely together but also because it helps having a spouse on the other end of it. We can ask each other daily or weekly about our goals, and we can see how far we have to get there or how close we actually are. Not to mention, it boosts our confidence to have a person we love who is interested and invested in what we’re doing.
