Tag: plan

Making a plan

I’ve been playing with a social media plan to get more readers. Apparently, writers need to do more than write to be successful, unless they get picked up for a $3.4 million book deal with TOR like John Scalzi and get major name recognition.


General goals from my plan:

  • To reach more readers
  • To have a vibrant community to talk with
  • To share my works with people 
So far, my presence on social media is as follows:
  • I have 20 regular readers here on Blogger
  • I have not gotten a comment on Blogger (other than fraudulent sales pitches) for over a year
  • I have less than 20 followers on Twitter
  • I get 2-3 likes a day on Twitter
  • I have 79 followers on Facebook
Time to set outcomes:

  • To get 30 regular readers on Blogger
  • To get 3 comments a week
  • To get 30 followers on Twitter
  • To get 10 likes a day on Twitter
  • I have 100 followers on Facebook
Why are these so small? Because SMART goals are:
  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Action Oriented
  • Realistic
  • Time Bound
But note these aren’t really the goals above, but results. The part I’m currently struggling with is HOW to increase readership and interaction.

This is a work in progress.

The Plan

I have a plan for how I’m going to handle the whole querying thing. Bear with me:

  1. I will continue dev editing and re-editing my existent books one at a time because that’s just good practice wherever I’m published.
  2. I will wait for six months for this querying cycle on Prodigies to complete, researching self-publishing and self-marketing as I go.
  3. If at the end of those six months I don’t have any takers, I will self-publish Prodigies. You will hear a lot about this and hopefully you will read it. 🙂
  4. I will query other books as they get edited — Voyageurs will probably be the second book in the pipeline, followed by Apocalypse. And so on.

This plan doesn’t include writing. I have not written since I finished Whose Hearts are Mountains, which I am sure needs serious dev editing as do the others.  That’s only been a month and a half. I haven’t been inspired to write lately, but there are various directions I could go — a sequel to Prodigies, a sequel to Voyageurs, another book in the Archetype series, a faerie adventure/romance novel … I have enough books that need to go through the dev cycle, though, that I wouldn’t have to write for a while. But I don’t want to get rusty.

I am hoping, of course, that this hard work pays off. I don’t know why I’m getting rejections from agents except for the usual “…I’m very selective … I don’t know if I can represent this novel with the enthusiasm it deserves.” (Question: If it deserves enthusiasm, why aren’t you — oh, never mind.) But at least I have a plan so that I’m not at the mercy of judgments about “what sells”. I just know that I write for a reason, and I want to see what that reason is.