GOALS FOR 2024

Can you believe it is nearly 2024?

I don’t know about you, but it seems to have crept up on me too quickly. I can easily remember the year 2000 when there were huge firework displays all around the globe to welcome in the New Year. You may remember it too, or perhaps you were a toddler, or not even born in the year 2000. That seems impossible to me as the years have gone marching on and I haven’t noticed!

Some scaremongers said a meteor would strike the earth at midnight in the year 2000 and we would all die, but luckily that never happened.

If I think back on my resolutions for 2023, I am quite pleased with myself as my goal was to write three books and I managed to write three books and also a short story. I did take some time off between each book which served me well.

It is essential to take time off in between big projects, otherwise you get burn-out and nobody wants that.

I wonder what your goals will be for the year 2024. Have you thought about it yet? Have you made a decision? If you are suffering with a mental illness or are just plain lonely, it is good to have a goal to work towards. You may not think it is necessary, but it gives you a purpose in life, something to live for. If you amble through life without a goal, you find the days are long and dull. It is worth making the effort to do something to make yourself proud.

The thing about goals is you can’t expect to achieve them all at once. If you have a big goal it is best to break it down into smaller goals, things you can manage each day. I would suggest you mark your goal on a calendar and hang it where you can see it. When you have your big goal in place, break it up into parts that you can achieve monthly and plot them on the calendar. Make sure your goal is not too big to handle, though, or you will not be able to finish it.

I had a sort of goal quite recently which I would like to share with you. As you know writing a book is one thing, but selling it is quite another. You could even say it is easy to write a book, but the marketing is hard. It is so hard, in fact, that most writers are baffled by it and don’t know where to start.

This was me. I read so much about marketing, and watched many You Tube videos on the subject but I still didn’t understand it. Or if I did understand it, I was not able to do it myself on a regular basis. This is so common with authors that they just give up and leave their books out there to let Amazon take care of the rest. Sadly, Amazon does not care about your little book – they publish 7,000 books a day so why should they care about your book? They may promote it a bit at the beginning by putting it on the first page, but that doesn’t last and you are left to mareket it yourself.

Anyway, I decided to market it by doing what fitted my personality. I had read that you must do book sales in stores, and talks in libraries, and all manner of things in the public eye. As it happens I am an introvert by nature and don’t like doing things that will put me in the spotlight, so I worked on a different plan. I am now doing three things a day that I actually like to do and it is working out fine. 

The reason I am telling you this is that you, too, can do a small amount of things towards your goal every month and before you know it, you will have reached your goal. Then it is time to celebrate. Never reach a goal without celebrating your win. Pat yourself on the back.

I am celebrating this January because I decided recently to write some fiction instead of nonfiction all the time. Swapping genres is difficult, but not impossible. I just had to make my brain work in a different direction. Nonfiction is more of a left brain activity, whereas fiction is a right brain activity. I am happy to say, with a little effort on my part, I was able to reach my goal little by little and produce a novella (a small novel) ready for publication. I am very excited to tell you that it will be ready for publication on January 3^rd and I hope you will look it up on Amazon.

It is called Shards of Glass and I am offering a free short story to anybody who reads my book. The short story is called One Summer and you can find the freebie at the end of the book.

Do let me know your goal for 2024 in the comments below. It would be good to share it with everyone.

Sally

Here you can find a link to my Amazon author page:

 https://www.amazon.com/stores/Sally-Alter/author/B0971TWK77?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=