Hi guys!It’s a whole new year, and we’re planning all sorts of good things for you, but today, I wanted to touch on goals.
Back to…
Today seems to be the day for us to all be back at ‘work/writing/life’. The holidays, however, they were, are over and I’m on the fence about whether to goal or not to goal. I do, but I know others on the team don’t, so I thought I’d talk about how I’m organising my year, and if you’d like to share yours in the comments I’d love to hear from you!
Back to life, back to reality
Well, sort of. It’s pretty much a well-known fact that I live in a world of my own. It’s a nice world, if a touch grim sometimes (though, like many people my post-apocalyptic game is way down), but I’m hoping to find my way back to my main world. I’m sure I will, but I’m working really hard on planning books and re-releasing. I’m in an odd place as a writer – my backlist has completely expired back to me and I can choose to reboot everything, so the options really are endless for me. But I’m also starting a brand new pen name, so I’ll be working as a new author, and building up from my actual platform too. So, this year, I’ll be sharing a lot of everything that I’m learning. In fact, this month, I’m starting with newsletters.I do have goals too, but I’m trying hard to actually pin them SMART format. Tying that to an ROI to boot is really difficult, especially when it’s something that’s not measurable by numbers, but I think if you set goals for yourself, you’ve got to find a way to measure them.
Planning in my me-time
The mistake I made last year was not planning some me time – I always told myself that I’d take my time off, but one thing or another came out, and even with everything that’s gone on in the last year – in fact, possibly because of it in some ways – I didn’t really take care of myself properly. I’ve got meditation apps, and things to help me sleep, and I’ve still completely failed on that front. Which is the last lesson thing I wanted to touch on – I’ve been seeing people talk about goals in terms of ‘I failed so…’YOU DID NOT FAIL! (sorry, I didn’t mean to yell, but seriously).The dichotomy in the author community is writing *is* lonely, but then again, it isn’t. We’ve got access to so many communities, but that leaves us open to so much, from poor influences that can throw us off, to seeing people where we want to be and feeling bad, to feeling intimidated and upset when things go badly. And the thing is, even if we’ve put out lots, won awards, had a good time with people, we always seem to focus on the negative, so if you’re not setting goals, please take one thing from this post, and just think about the good, not the bad. It’s important to focus on the good, always. That’s how we get through.We’ll be talking about SMART later this week again, and newsletters for the next little while so if you’ve got anything you’d like to share, then hit the comments. Questions and requests, comments! And welcome to 2021. No resolutions from me, but I do want to rock it, in any way I can, and know that with the community that IAG is, we can do almost anything.See you Saturday!
Kai Wilson-Viola writes under various names, and in all genres. Co-founder and webmistress of the IAG site, she writes content on request of members.
She has written several books including the Ten Hour Marketing Plan and 12x12 - tutorials for social media.
When not writing, she can be found maintaining sites, designing themes, managing a charity called the Less than Three foundation, gaming, knitting or reading.
Pen names are an effective way to separate out your different genres and your writings. It is also a good way to build up different fan bases for different genres of writing (but only if you need to separate them). … Continued
Kindle Unlimited, if you are a reader or writer is a scheme that has been designed to give another way to enjoy books as a reader, and as an author, another possible stream of income.If you’d like to sign up … Continued
The KENP is the pool available and the worth of each page read on any books registered AND read in the Kindle Unlimited pool of reads.Reads can make up a substantial amount of your income or it can be nothing. … Continued
An ASIN is an Amazon Standard Identification Number and in many cases, it’s what most people use to publish their books, rather than an ISBN, as it’s free. The ASIN is the main way Ebooks are catalogued on Amazon. A … Continued
An ISBN is a unique identifier attached to your books, which you purchase from Bowker. This unique identifier is most often seen on print books and is how your barcode is formed, though it also allows listing, purchase in shops … Continued
DRM or Digital Rights Management is an item that many platforms might offer to ‘protect’ your eBooks. In reality, DRM often only frustrates readers, and is easy to break by pirates. DRM is not recommended as it’s not a good … Continued
KDP Select is Amazon’s exclusive publishing platform. In exchange for making your book exclusively available to only Amazon in Ebook format, you get the right to promote and use other exclusive tools – it is the only way to access … Continued
CreateSpace has been discontinued and rolled into the same dashboard as your ebooks, and is now called KDP Print.CreateSpace used to distribute Amazon-printed books, so that’s now been integrated into the same board as Kindle Direct Publishing, which you can … Continued
Amazon’s X-Ray uses the power of the net, and crowdsources (usually from Wikipedia or you can write your own custom descriptions) the answers to terms and difficult points in your book. X-Ray can be found in the KDP dashboard, and … Continued
One of the last prep things that most people ask to do is how they should remove two spaces and have only one between sentences. While people will sometimes say it doesn’t matter, if you want to, in Word, you use … Continued
Hi guys! It’s a whole new year, and we’re planning all sorts of good things for you, but today, I wanted to touch on goals. Back to… Today seems to be the day for us to all be back at ‘work/writing/life’. The holidays, however, they were, are over and I’m on the fence about whether to goal or not to goal. I do, but I know others on the team don’t, so I thought I’d...
Well, the team have spoken, we’re updating the site, and there’s a lot of fun changes coming up.I thought today though, I’d share some of our best bits on the site. Resources for miles At the core of things at the Indie Author Group is our mission statement. Both Valerie Douglas and I felt, early on, supported by the rest of the team, that a safe space to get advice as an indie author. We...
I’m not sure if many of you know, but one of our driving forces, a founder, and an amazing indie writer, is celebrating her birthday, during lockdown. She’s not able to be with the people that care for her, so I thought, well, we’re a community that wouldn’t exist without her, so why don’t we stand in for her family.Please join me in wishing the AMAZING Valerie Douglas a very happy birthday. If you like,...
Happy birthday to the Indie Author Group. Founded just as the trend of self-publishing took off by Valerie Douglas, and her co-founder Kai Viola, we are a vibrant team of writers and artists that look after one of the oldest communities for self-publishing and hybrid publishing on the Facebook.It’s our birthday today! We’ll be celebrating next week though, so watch the blog, group and page! (or the blog page!)To celebrate our 9th birthday, we’ll be...
Today is National Sci-Fi day, and while we’re not on Sci-fi this month (that’s later in the year) as our featured support genre, for advice Mondays, I thought I’d share a bit of a thought experiment. First though… We’re a nation – or half of one – proud of our ignorance https://t.co/3I5AMHu7Ia — Valerie Douglas #fantasy #thriller #romance (@ValerieDouglasA) January 2, 2020 Today would be Issac’s 100th birthday, and there’s little denying the impact he...