It feels like I’ve accomplished a lot, and much less than I wanted at the same time.

Even though the Daily Blog Project fizzled in late November (after a streak of over 100 days!), it is amazing to have them all, even if the only reader is myself. They highlight every up and down, and remind me that a lot got done, even if the overarching goals were not fully realized.

Starting stats comparison

On July 31, I noted some starting statistics. Let’s see (roughly) where I am now.

• Nine titles on KDP (+5 from 4)
• Estimating $0.08/day in royalties (+$0.08 from $0.00)
• Added at least 40,000 new words, well under the 20K/month goal of 100,000
• Still 0 email subscribers
• Net gain of 31 Wattpad followers, some 8,000 new hits on The Mountain Dancer
• 2 new Reddit Stories
• 48 CC crits (+12 from 36)

That’s mostly the good news. There are also some other fun things like moving this site from Wix to WordPress and getting Hunting Midnight‘s pilot episode into a paperback format.

Some failures include:

• As noted above, word count experienced a significant downward trend as the weeks marched on. Hoped for 100,000, landed somewhere between 40K and 50K
• Failed to diligently track wordcount after a certain amount of time
• Daily blog project fizzled in late Novemeber
• Not nearly as much: critiquing, novel reading, reddit contributions nor Wattpad participation as I wanted
• Four week cycle of Asana “Sidelines” fizzled at the same rate as everything else
• Although there were five new KDP titles, these were mostly the episodic chunks of Childseeker and Hunting Midnight, so they don’t really count towards the shipping of work (although they may one day be algorithmically advantageous)

Lessons learned

I think the biggest thing was understanding how much work it is to achieve 20,000 words per month. This is a rough, general figure for those who want to publish often enough to generate a living.

It’s quite doable (I got about halfway), but it does require some solid commitment. Daily, it’s about 660 words. In my case, that’s an hour/day (every day). This does not count:

• editing
• publishing/producing
• platform

As I discussed in this post, the division of energy may be best spent in the platform… as much as 75% of all effort. So if I have 20 hours per week to spend on writing, 7 must be in high quality writing (35% right there), and the rest in platform unless something’s ready to be shipped.

What is the platform?

In today’s Internet saturated world, the platform is the author’s online story, ad ecosystem, and support system of links and content. All the little pieces that shepherd people towards the top of the story-buying funnel.

It’s this blog and this site, in some respect… but it could also be an Instagram account, a loyal following on a website, or a good network of reviewers.

It’ll take some time to puzzle this all out, and “Figuring Out The Platform” is a reasonable goal for 2018. Perhaps by May 1… depending on what we mean by “figure out.”

The plan for 2018

Now that I have this pretty WordPress site set up, along with a new life “tracker,” the plan will be pretty simple for the winter months:

• Revitalize the daily blog, i.e. keep it going for as long as possible
• Instead of monthly recaps, attempt 1-2 larger, topical posts per month
• Test out the tracker, and try to stay on target of ~660 words per day
• Share charts and other insight from the tracker here on the blog

I’ll stick with Asana too, but maybe use it more passively if the tracker is my main tool. (I never shared how I set it up, and may still yet if it finds itself being super useful.) I also want to get my hands on a Mac temporarily so I can test some formatting stuff with Scrivener.

General midterm goals include:

• Finish Hunting Midnight (Alena Bisk Stories, Season One), start Season Two
• Start Childseeker’s War, Part Two
• Draft Chillcrafters
• Publish a friend’s book under the MostlyLies.com imprint (this will happen hopefully sooner than later)
• Have a small hit on reddit with some original short fiction (I’ll consider 500 upvotes a small hit)
• Plot out half a dozen new ideas

If most of this can happen before the project anniversary of July 31, 2018, then that’s a big deal. That’s a stretchy goal, but something to aim at! Even within 2018 proper would be fantastic.

---

This is long and kind of all over the place as it is, so I’ll end it here. Happy New Year, happy writing, reading and creating 🙂