It’s that time of year again! You know, the season of setting goals, making resolutions, and generally convincing yourself that this year will be different through the sheer force of your holiday-fueled determination.
Everyone finds it easy to make goals when there’s a ton of enthusiasm and peer support for the project. But it’s easy to lose your focus and drive around January 16th when all your friends have quit their goals, there’s a cold going around the office, and you have a pressing deadline that can’t be avoided. Getting up at 5am for yoga and a healthy, seasonable, fresh-cooked breakfast instead of a cold cereal and coffee seems a lot less doable.
So let’s not look at what goals to set but how to set goals you’ll actually be able to keep.
You’re probably already familiar with the concept of SMART goals:
S – specific
M – measurable
A – attainable
R – relevant
T – time-based
For publishing this is very frustrating. Word counts come in ranges. Success is defined by a lot of other variables. Time in publishing is a strange thing not measurable by any clock.
That leaves us with Attainable goals and Relevant goals. I already wrote about deadlines and success HERE so today I’m going to focus on setting goals that you can control.
Things You Can’t Control In Publishing:
– who likes your book
– if a literary agent signs you as a client
– if a publisher makes an offer on your book
– how many copies of your book you sell
That’s the short list. There are other details that you only have minimal control over, like when your book comes out, how the market is doing, and other little vagaries of the industry. You can’t control it all so it’s important to focus on what you can do.
Things You Can Control In Publishing:
– marketing your book to the right people
– sending queries
– accepting smart offers
– how you present yourself to the world
– what you do with what happens
The last one is probably the most important. Publishing, like any creative industry, has its ups and downs. There are trends. There are days – sometimes years – when things don’t sell well. There are slumps. There are unbelievable highs and accolades that take you up the precipice of adoration, the money flowing in, only to find yourself sitting alone and in silence a few years later.
Being the Next Big Thing is only great until someone comes to be the next Next Big Thing.
What a smart author does is look at their goals and modify them so they are actually something you, as the author, can control without help from anyone.
Goal 1: Get Published ~becomes~> Work Towards Publication
– write a book
– edit the book well
– improve your writing skills
– pick your ideal publication route
– follow that route
Goal 2: Be A Famous Author ~becomes~> Market My Book Well
– know your genre
– know your ideal audience
– know how your perfect reader finds books
– recognize what you have to offer to the community of readers
– give yourself opportunities to market your book
Goal 3: Sign With a Literary Agent ~becomes~> Look For A Literary Agent
– research agents
– write the best query possible
– send query only to agents who rep what you write
– continue tweaking your query and sending it out
– continue improving your writing skills
– write the next book
– if Book One doesn’t get an agent, edit and send out Book Two
When you set small, achievable goals that rely only on what you can do you’ll find that you are succeeding more often than not. When you do fail (as often happens when we try new things) it will be because that failure was part of the learning process. It will become a building block of the goal you are reaching for.
Go on.
Set good goals.
The world has great things in store for you.