Welcome to my penultimate post of 2020, where I discuss how my writing plans, like everything else this year, didn't go the way I thought they would. Nevertheless, I did manage to accomplish some useful things.
At the beginning of 2020, my main goal was to finish my urban fantasy series about a dryad living on the UW-Madison campus. I not only need to finish the final book of the trilogy, but I need to revise the first two books. I still continue to struggle with this series. One of my main issues is that the focus of the series has shifted from my heroine to her love interest. I need to do a better job of balancing their stories so I can complete both of them. The other issue is that I keep abandoning this series to focus on shiny new projects. Even when I set goals for myself to write a certain number of words on this series, it doesn't happen. I guess I need to ask myself some hard questions about this series to see if I still want to finish it when I have so many other stories competing for my attention.
Even though I didn't accomplish much on the dryads trilogy, I still finished or started several other projects. They include the first draft of the first book of a cozy mystery series, about half of the second cozy mystery book in that series, a fantasy short story (a pandemic version of the Seven Swans fairy tale) that I'm currently trying to sell, the first draft of a novelette in the Seasons Avatars universe, and another fantasy short story targeted for an anthology that closes next week. The final story isn't quite done as I write this blog post on Sunday, so hopefully I'll have the first draft done before this post goes live.
I didn't indie-publish anything this year, but my short story "A Shawl for Janice" was published in a solarpunk anthology in January. One of my publishing goals for this year was to sell (not just give away) 100 books. It's a modest goal, certainly not more than coffee-level money, but at least I managed to meet it. I sold about 112 books across almost all platforms (I haven't checked Google Play lately.) One publishing thing I did this year was stop relying on distributors like Draft2Digital and publish directly to Kobo, Google, Barnes and Noble, and Apple. This is supposed to give me better control of marketing and promotions, but I still have a lot to learn about working with these platforms.
Given how easily my plans go awry, is it worth setting goals for 2021? I still think so, though I probably need to focus more on my goals and try not to let new projects distract me. Before I can set goals for specific projects, I need to decide how much time I want to give to cozy mysteries and how much time I want to give to my science fiction/fantasy. I think the cozy mysteries offer more market potential, but I still want to write in the Season Avatars universe and revisit other worlds I've created. How to juggle all that along with my job, family, and other personal projects continues to be a challenge.
Happy Holidays to everyone! Next week, I'll discuss reading in 2020. For now, feel free to share how your writing went this year.
1 comment:
At least you hit your selling goal. Difficult to do in a year when we can't get out and promote in person. And juggling all of life on top of it is certainly a challenge.
See you next year - Merry Christmas!
Post a Comment