It’s always a good idea to have a plan for what comes next, whether youare successful or suffer a setback. I don’t mean planning what you are going to spend your newfound riches on (in the case of winning the lottery or becoming a famous, successful author). I mean knowing deep down what the next steps need to be.
Take getting a book published, for example. You get your contract. Now what?
Ideally you should already be out beating the bushes for promotional/marketing opportunities. Get to meet bookstore managers for signings, librarians for readings and newspapers for writeups.
I was thinking about this today in regards to this site specifically. I started my podcast in January and planned to get familiar with the recording and production before I started to expand my horizons and bring in interviewees. I failed to plan for a couple other things though.
The first was my schedule. I had originally planned to produce one episode of the podcast a month. I was already doing a new blog post weekly. What I didn’t plan for was how the podcast would affect the blog. Instead of adding to my existing workload, I replaced a blog entry with a podcast one.
I’ve already been thinking that I’m giving you, the reader enough bang for your time investment, so naturally I decrease the amount of actual, written content. Pretty clever, wouldn’t you say?
What I should have been ready for was to add the podcast as some of that additional content.
The second thing I hadn’t prepared for was what I would do once the podcast started taking off. I had planned for a couple regular episodes to be posted between each interview episode. As it turns out, I now have a list of interviewees that, if I keep my current schedule, will last me until the fall. Should I try to turn an episode out every two weeks instead of monthly? And if I do, how will that affect the blog? I hadn’t planned for that.
What it ultimately means is I have more work to do, but isn’t that what usually happens when one is successful? Success breeds success and you do more. That’s what I need to be doing too.
So, I will be breaking from my current routine and providing more frequent postings, more podcast episodes and I’ve got a couple other things I plan to add to the site as well. Stay tuned.
Personal Updates
Episode 4 of ‘Get Published’ has proven to be bigger than I expected. I was very fortunate to have such a great guest in Christiana Ellis (www.christianaellis.com). Because of that success (there’s that word again) I have a list of interviewees that will keep me busy for a while. I’m very excited to speak to all of them.
Nothing new on the publisher front. My YA novel is still in front of the publisher, but these things do take time and I am patiently waiting. The new writing project is moving forward slowly, but it is moving.
