Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

How to Make Your Annual Plan

January 1, 2022 by Randy Ingermanson 1 Comment

It’s an old tradition to make New Year’s Resolutions every year. It’s an equally old tradition to completely forget them by the second week of January.

Savvy authors don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. They make an Annual Plan. But what is an Annual Plan? Why is it better than New Year’s Resolutions? How do you make one? And how do you stick with it?

What is an Annual Plan?

An Annual Plan is just a list of achievements you hope for in the coming year. I can think of three main types of achievements that have gone into my own Annual Plans over the years:

Things you want to get.
Things you want to do.
Things you want to learn.

Maybe you want to buy a house. Or a new car. Or a bike. Or whatever. These are things you want to get.

Maybe you want to hike the Grand Canyon. Or swim the English Channel. Or take a vacation in Italy. These are things you want to do.

Maybe you want to learn how to build websites. Or how to speak French. Or how to fix your car. These are skills you want to learn.

Note that some of these have endpoints and some of them don’t. If you buy a house or a car or a bike, then you either own them or you don’t. If you take a hike or a swim or a vacation, you either did it or you didn’t. But if you learn a new skill, then there are levels of skill, and you may never really be done. So in the case of a skill, it’s always good to specify what level of skill you’re talking about.

Why is an Annual Plan Better than New Year’s Resolutions?

If you ever made a New Year’s Resolution, think for a moment what went wrong. You almost certainly didn’t follow through on it. Hardly anyone ever does. But why not?

There are several problems with New Year’s Resolutions:

They are often not well-defined.
They are often about things beyond your control.
They usually just state the endpoint, without any clear path to get there.

A common resolution is “I want to lose weight this year.” That’s not well-defined. How much weight? What control do you have over your body to make it lose weight? What actions can you take to lose weight, if any, and how much of them do you have to do?

Another common resolution is “I want to get fit this year.” You can see this has the same problems. What do you mean by “fit?” Stronger? More endurance? Higher oxygen uptake? Better-looking? Those are not the same thing, and they may be working at cross-purposes.

An Annual Plan doesn’t just say what you want to achieve. It maps out a path to get there. And part of the path is to make a periodic review of your Annual Plan to keep you on track. That means scheduling a weekly review into your life.

How Do You Make Your Annual Plan?

Your Annual Plan will not live in isolation, as if it is the only thing you want to achieve in life. Your Annual Plan needs to be part of something bigger. Something that will motivate you to actually follow through on it. And to keep it up to date and make changes to it as your life evolves.

Because your life is going to evolve in unexpected ways. Remember what you intended to do two years ago, at the very beginning of 2020? You had a bunch of things you wanted. And then covid hit. You had to evolve very rapidly to respond to covid. We all did. Because bad stuff happened. Bad stuff happens every year, and good stuff. You have to evolve to respond to both.

So your Annual Plan is only a part of your life, and it all comes from your Massively Transformative Purpose. If that term isn’t familiar to you, then read my blog post, Your Massively Transformative Purpose.

Once you know your Massively Transformative Purpose, (your MTP), you need to spell out what Steven Kotler calls your “High Hard Goals.” These are concrete achievements that may take several years. Like graduating from law school. Or launching a new business that achieves $1M in gross sales. Or creating a nonprofit. Or whatever’s in line with your MTP.

Your High Hard Goals don’t have to be earthshaking. They just need to matter to you, and be difficult enough to challenge you for years and years.

Once you’ve got your High Hard Goals, you can set up an Annual Plan with a few achievements that you can reasonably make in the coming year that will move you closer to your High Hard Goals.

Your Annual Plan should include the following:

Achievements for this year.
Achievements for the next quarter in this year.
Achievements for the next month in this year.
Achievements for the next week in this year.
A specific time every week when you will review the whole thing and make changes to it as your life evolves.

How Do You Stick With Your Annual Plan?

The secret is in that #5 above. You need to review the whole thing every week, and make adjustments. This is a bit like driving through the fog at night. You keep a sharp eye on the road and make adjustments every few seconds as needed. Because you can’t see very much of the road.

This is why you don’t need to map out your achievements for more than one quarter at a time. The achievements you define for the next quarter should be things that you expect will take you closer to the achievements you defined for the full year. Not the whole way. Just part of the way. Because stuff will happen this quarter, and your life will evolve in ways you can’t predict, and your plan will change.

And likewise, you don’t have to spell out all three months in the next quarter of the year. Just the first month. Because stuff will happen this month, and your life will evolve, and your plan will change.

And likewise, you don’t have to spell out all four weeks in the next month. Just the first week. You know the drill. Stuff will happen this week, and your life will evolve, and your plan will change.

Evolving Your Annual Plan

Every week, review the whole plan. You can do this very quickly, because the plan is not complete. It only targets the next quarter, and the next month, and the next week. If you made your weekly goals for the past week, congratulate yourself. You did well.

If you didn’t make your weekly goals, don’t jump on yourself. Ask why and adjust your plan.

Did you make too many goals for the last week? Lighten up your schedule for next week.
Did something bad happen that blocked you? Make a decision on how to deal with that going forward, and push back last week’s goals to next week, or throw them out and make new ones.
Did something good happen that got you moving in a new direction? Great! Run with that, if it fits in with your Massively Transformative Purpose. Adjust your Annual Plan all the way up the chain, starting with this coming week, then the current month, then the current quarter, and finally the current year.

In a word, adapt. Every week. Your Annual Plan is not set in stone. Your Annual Plan is short and easy to adapt.

And if you keep reviewing it and adapting it every week, it’ll take you somewhere wonderful. You can’t possibly predict exactly where it’ll take you, because you can’t predict what future stuff will come at you. All you can do is play the cards that life deals you. And keep moving forward toward your Massively Transformative Purpose.

Your Annual Plan is your roadmap to do that efficiently.

Your Massively Transformative Purpose

December 1, 2021 by Randy Ingermanson 3 Comments

in Career Management

Writing fiction is hard work for low pay. If you’re going to succeed, you need to know why you’re doing it. A reason to keep going when things are going badly.

A couple of months ago, I read a book by Steven Kotler that helped me see what it is that keeps a writer going. The book is titled The Art of Impossible, and it’s one of the best books I read this year.

The Art of Impossible is about tackling big projects, things that seem impossible. And achieving them. Let’s not fool ourselves that this is easy. It’s hard. But it can be done, if you take a long-term strategy.

Part 1 of the book covers Motivation, the thing that keeps you going. Kotler breaks Motivation down into several elements, and I can’t possibly cover them all here. But one of the elements seems to be the key. Kotler calls it the Massively Transformative Purpose. MTP for short.

What is a Massively Transformative Purpose?

An MTP is that impossible thing that you want to achieve that will make the world a better place. It’s not merely something that will make you rich. Or famous. Or attractive. Those are all fine things, but they’re all self-centered and they won’t take you very far. Your MTP needs to be something that transcends yourself. It’s bigger than you, and it’ll carry you farther than some selfish desire. That’s just the way you’re wired, neurologically.

A good MTP is always a bit vague. Miss America contestants are famous for all wanting to achieve “world peace.” Plenty of jokes have been made about that. But “world peace” is actually not a bad MTP. Because it’s vague and amorphous. What does “world peace” look like? You have to think about what it means to you, and then set some clear, precise goals that will take you towards world peace. Kotler calls those “high hard goals.”

High hard goals are things you can measure. You’ll know when you achieve them. And that’s good. None of them will get you all the way to your MTP, whatever it may be. “World peace” may never arrive. But those high hard goals CAN arrive.

How Much is Too Much?

You might think that you are only allowed to have one MTP in your life, and you have to be focused completely on that until you die. Which sounds like a grind.

But Kotler says you can have more than one MTP. He recommends that you have no more than three Massively Transformative Purposes in your life. He has three. After I read the book and thought about it some, I realized I have three also, and mine are all related to each other.

What Do You Do With Your MTP?

It takes a fair bit of work to figure out your Massively Transformative Purpose in life. Much of Chapter 2 of Kotler’s book is about how to figure out yours.

So why go to all this work? There are two clear benefits of working out your MTPs:

MTPs tell you when to say no. It’s all too easy to say yes to opportunities that come along. Until your life is so packed, you feel like you’re drowning. But your MTPs give you a way to know when to say no. If that amazing opportunity doesn’t take you closer to your MTP, then say no. Period. I wish I’d known this forty years ago.
MTPs keep you going when the night is dark. If you’ve never known a dark night, you won’t get this. If you have, you will. Keep living long enough, and you’ll have plenty of dark nights. And you’ll be very glad you have an MTP to light the way forward.

How to Find Your Massively Transformative Purpose

Read the first two chapters of Steven Kotler’s book, The Art of Impossible. Chapter 1 is groundwork. Chapter 2 will walk you through the process of finding your MTP.

I won’t try to summarize the steps here. You need the groundwork before you can understand the steps. Get the book and read the first couple of chapters and make a note of every actionable task you find.

Then do those actionable tasks, and at the end of the game, you’ll have your Massively Transformative Purpose.

And your life will suddenly have a very clear direction. Good luck!

Search Engine Optimization for Novelists

September 15, 2021 by Randy Ingermanson 5 Comments

in Marketing

What is “Search Engine Optimization” and why would any novelist need it?

Here’s the short answer: If you have a website to promote your books, then you’d like people to visit it, right? And you’d rather not pay to get people to come to your site, right? And the reason search engines like Google exist is to help people find things on the web they’re looking for, right? So Search Engine Optimization is the process of making sure they find you.

By the way, Search Engine Optimization is normally abbreviated as “SEO,” so that’s what I’ll call it for the rest of this article.

Why Authors Need SEO

A novelist can live their whole life never thinking about SEO. After all, it’s a techie thing, and authors are creative, so why bother? The answer is simple. If you don’t bother with SEO, then your site will not work as hard for you as it should. But if you take a little time to learn SEO, your site can do amazing things for you.

What Goes Wrong When an Author has Poor SEO

And here’s the problem: Search engines don’t always get it right, if you don’t help them out a little. Twenty years ago, an author friend emailed me to ask, “why does Google hate me?” She had noticed that when she searched for her name on Google, the description Google showed in the search results was some very strange paragraph. It didn’t really explain who she was or what she wrote, and she thought that meant Google didn’t like her.

I did about three minutes of research and told her what the problem was. Whoever made her website hadn’t done anything to help Google figure out what to display in the search results. So Google’s engine came up with … something, but it wasn’t a very good something. I told her how to fix it, and ten minutes later, it was fixed. For good. (For techies: she had no meta description on any of her pages. So Google used the description it found on Alexa, and it was a very generic description.)

That’s part of what Search Engine Optimization is about—helping Google help you.

What Goes Right When an Author has Good SEO

When your website has good SEO, you get traffic to your site. Traffic to your site means more True Fans sign up for your e-mail newsletter. More True Fans on your newsletter means that the launch of your next novel goes better. This is part of the Virtuous Cycle of Marketing that I blogged about earlier this year.

As an example, when I first started this website, I put a bit of thought into how to make life easy for the search engines to find my articles. And over the years, this site has pulled in more than 10,000,000 page views. Most of those came from the search engines. That’s free traffic, coming in 24/7/365, whether I was working or at the beach or sleeping.

WordPress and the Yoast SEO Plugin

Now let’s be clear that the web has evolved a lot in twenty years. Very few people write their own code for their website anymore. Most authors use a free tool called WordPress to create their site. WordPress is great (I use it for both my websites), so in this article, I’ll focus on how to do your SEO for a WordPress site.

And the search engines have evolved a lot also. Google and Bing and all the others are vastly smarter than they used to be. I can remember all kinds of tricks people used to play to “fool” Google into sending traffic to their sites. Those tricks don’t work anymore.

Sound SEO

Only two “tricks” actually work long-term for good sound SEO, and neither of them is a trick:

Write clear, useful, informative content on your website.
Give Google and the other search engines the basic info they need to understand your site.

A very popular tool for helping you do both of those things is a WordPress plugin called Yoast SEO. If you have a WordPress site and don’t know what a “WordPress plugin” is, then you didn’t create your website; you paid someone to do it, and they will know what a plugin is. In fact, they probably already installed the free Yoast SEO plugin on your site, because it’s good and you can’t beat the price of free.

How Yoast SEO Helps

If you have a WordPress website, you should at least know how to add new pages to your site (and also new blog posts, if your site includes a blog). And the point of the Yoast SEO plugin is that it looks over each page or post you write while you’re writing it, and it gives you helpful suggestions on those two things I mentioned above. So Yoast does these two things:

Yoast SEO helps you write clear, useful, informative content
Yoast SEO helps you give Google the info it needs about your page or post

SEO has gotten very complicated over the years. Yoast handles a lot of those complications for you, by making suggestions. But you need some basic understanding of SEO to understand what Yoast is telling you. And where will you get that basic understanding?

Your One-Stop Source for Learning SEO: Yoast Academy

The best place to learn about the Yoast SEO plugin is a section of Yoast’s website called Yoast Academy. Part of Yoast Academy is free and part of it is not free. Let me explain why.

What’s in Yoast Academy

I said above that the Yoast SEO plugin is free. So how can they afford to make an amazingly great and powerful tool and give it away free to millions of website owners? They afford it by making a second plugin called Yoast SEO Premium that is not free and has even more features than Yoast SEO. (I like Yoast SEO Premium and I pay for it on both my websites, because it’s excellent.)

Yoast Academy is a set of very good online video courses that cover most of what you need to know in SEO. They have 8 excellent free courses, and 9 even more intensive paid courses. If you own Yoast SEO Premium, then you get free access to the paid courses—they’re part of the premium package. I recommend that you start with the free courses, and only take the paid ones if you need them.

Where to Find Yoast Academy

You can find Yoast Academy here on the Yoast website, but you’ll need to create a free account first before you can log in to the Academy.

Once you log in, you’ll be overwhelmed with choices. Yoast Academy has 17 courses! They’re all good, but which should you take first?

I’ll answer that question in the rest of this article. For most novelists, you can learn the basics of SEO by taking just a couple of courses in Yoast Academy. Then as you get more advanced, you might decide to take more specialized courses that explain the fine points in more detail. Or you might decide that you know enough to do your job and never take another course again.

But First: How Well Do You Know WordPress?

Nobody is an expert in everything. It’s quite possible you don’t feel like you’re really up to speed on using WordPress yet.

That’s OK. If you don’t feel comfortable yet writing your own pages or posts on WordPress, then Yoast Academy has a free course that will teach you the basics quickly. It’s called WordPress for Beginners and it will get you rolling fast.

If you need it, start there. Don’t try to cut corners by trying to run before you can walk. You’ll be surprised how fast you learn the essentials. And after that, you’ll be off to the races.

Using the Free Yoast Plugin Effectively

I recommend that authors start by using the free Yoast SEO plugin. If that’s all you ever need, then you won’t ever pay anything, and you’ll get pretty good Search Engine Optimization on your site, and that’s a deal.

Core Courses for Yoast SEO Users

In this case, the very first course you should take in Yoast Academy is the free course SEO for Beginners. It’s quite short, but it’s packed with all the most essential info to get you using the Yoast SEO plugin quickly and well.

Once you understand how SEO works, then choose from one of these two free courses that will teach you how to use the Yoast SEO plugin effectively:

How do you decide which of these to take? That depends which WordPress editor you’re using to create your pages and posts. There are two standard editors available: 1) the new “block editor”, or 2) the older “classic editor”. I’d recommend that you use the new block editor, since the word on the street is that soon the classic editor will no longer be supported in WordPress. So you might as well start using the block editor, which is the future of WordPress. Once you decide which WordPress editor you’re using, that tells you which of the two courses above you should take.

More Advanced Courses for Yoast SEO Users

That may be all the courses you ever need. If so, that’s wonderful. However, you may also decide that you want to go deeper on some topic or another. In that case, here are a couple of other free courses you might want to take, in the most likely order that you’d want to take them:

Structured Data for Beginners (this teaches you how to give Google the special information it needs in order to qualify your pages for those “rich results” you often see at the top of a Google search results page.
Block Editor Training (this teaches you all the ins and outs of the WordPress block editor.

There are a couple of other free offerings in Yoast Academy, and you can check them out when you’ve taken all the courses above. And if these free courses are all you ever take, you’ll be ahead of the vast majority of other novelists.

But you might choose to go farther, in case you decide to pay for the Yoast SEO Premium plugin….

Using the Yoast SEO Premium Plugin Effectively

As I said above, the reason the Yoast SEO plugin is free is because somebody is paying the bills—the people who pay for Yoast SEO Premium. I pay for this plugin and I think it’s a bargain. In case you decide to upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll also get access to several very intensive courses that will teach you even more about SEO than the free courses.

Core Courses for Yoast SEO Premium Users

I recommend that you start with the course All Around SEO. This will teach you quite a lot about SEO, covering the entire subject in logical order: first keyword research, then SEO copywriting, then site structure, then technical SEO, then off-page SEO, and finally the all-important user experience. This is a really good course, and you might decide it’s all you need to know about SEO.

Once you’ve taken the above course, you’ll still want to take one of the two free courses on how to use the Yoast SEO plugin. These will teach you all the ins and outs of the plugin you’re using. I mentioned them above, but here they are again:

More Advanced Courses for Yoast SEO Premium Users

If you really want to go deep, Yoast Academy has several other courses that go with Yoast SEO Premium plugin. Here is the logical order to take them in (because the later courses depend on the earlier ones):

Keyword Research (which teaches you how to decide what keywords to target in each page or post
SEO Copywriting (which teaches you how to write clear, useful, informative content for your website, the kind Google likes to send people to)
Site Structure (which teaches you how to organize your site so Google can understand which pages and posts are most important and which are less so)
Technical SEO (which teaches you all about “crawlability”)
Understanding Structured Data (which teaches you how to make your site really attractive to users, and therefore really attractive to Google)

Yoast Academy also has several other premium courses that are of less interest to novelists, so I’ll skip over those here. But if you’re interested, you can easily find them all on the Yoast Academy main page.

Ready to Get to Work?

In conclusion, SEO has grown into a big and complicated topic. You could spend years learning it all yourself, but life is short. It’s much quicker to simply install the free Yoast SEO plugin or the payware Yoast SEO Premium plugin and then take a few courses in Yoast Academy. The people at Yoast have already done mountains of work so you won’t have to. Take advantage of their knowledge and hard work to make your website more attractive to people searching for information on the web.

Want to learn more about marketing your novels? Check out my page on Marketing Tools for Writers where I recommend the best tools I know of for all the many aspects of marketing that an author needs to know.

A Virtuous Cycle for Marketing Your Books

April 21, 2021 by Randy Ingermanson 6 Comments

in Marketing Tagged: core marketing machine, Virtuous Cycle

Marketing books is hard. There are many dozens of things authors are “supposed” to be doing to increase their sales. The problem is that everything takes time, and authors are busy people.

It’s natural for an author to ask what their core marketing machine should look like. If you reduce things to the bare essentials, what would that be?

Here’s my opinion. The core marketing machine for an author should take the form of a “Virtuous Cycle” with three basic parts:

Your books send your fans to your website.
Your website invites your fans to sign up for your e-mail list.
Your e-mail list onboarding sequence promotes all your books.

This is called a “Virtuous Cycle” because each part of it feeds into the next, like this graphic:

But Where’s the Beginning?

You might ask, “which of these is the beginning?” That is, where do your fans get into this Virtuous Cycle?

The answer is that they might join it anywhere:

They might happen onto one of your books in a store and discover that they like your writing.
Or they might chance across your website in one of the thousand ways somebody can come to a website.
Or they might join your e-mail list in one of many common ways.

But no matter how they enter the Virtuous Cycle, they keep going through until they’ve done it all. They’ve visited your website, they’ve joined your e-mail list, and they’ve read most or all of your books.

Why This Matters in the Short Term

Once you’ve built your Virtuous Cycle, you can then expand on it in many different ways. Each way will inject new fans into the Virtuous Cycle at some point:

You can advertise your books directly using Amazon ads or Facebook ads or BookBub ads or any of the major deal sites.
You can focus on bringing in traffic to your website using search-engine optimization or ads on Facebook or Google or interviews on blogs or podcasts or many other ways.
You can focus on building your e-mail list using Facebook ads or joint author giveaways or many other list-building methods.

Each of these extensions to your marketing engine may or may not be cost-effective in the short-term. That is, running paid ads to promote one book may be a money-loser for that one book. But if it brings more readers to your website and then they sign up for your e-mail list and then they buy all your other books, then it’s a win in the long-term. And if the ads don’t work, you can stop them at any time, and your Virtuous Cycle still keeps working.

But the important thing is that you can now experiment on all those dozens of marketing methods that authors are “supposed” to do. Each of them will theoretically inject new fans into your Virtuous Cycle at some point. Each of them may or may not be cost-effective. Each of them can be turned on or off at any time, and the core marketing machine still just works.

Why This Matters in the Long Term

In the long term, you will continue to write books on a sustainable schedule. Maybe you can write one book per year. Or three. Or ten.

It’s up to you to find a schedule that you can keep at for the long haul.

If you’ve built your core marketing machine as a Virtuous Cycle, then every time you launch a book, here’s what will happen:

You’ll send several e-mails out to your True Fans, who will generate a big spike in sales during your Launch Week.
This will drive your book up the bestseller charts in its various categories, bringing it to the attention of readers who never heard of you before.
These new readers will now enter your Virtuous Cycle and grow your e-mail newsletter fan base.
They’ll discover all your other books, and those will all see a surge in sales.

So over time, your set of True Fans will grow and grow. And each book launch will do a bit better than the one before. And in between launches, your growing backlist of books will attract new readers, so your fan base will grow faster and faster.

The mathematical term for what happens when you have a working Virtuous Cycle is “exponential growth.” If that sounds awesome to you, it is. Exponential growth is how all successful products become breakout big winners.

How to Take Action When You’re Busy

What this means for a busy, overworked author is this. If you feel overwhelmed with all the marketing you’re doing or all the marketing you could be doing, then focus on your core marketing machine.

Create your Virtuous Cycle first. Build your website and hook it up to your e-mail newsletter signup. Get your onboarding sequence written for your e-mail newsletter, and use it to promote your books. Make sure all your books give your readers an incentive to go to your website to sign up for your e-mail newsletter.

Once your Virtuous Cycle is in place, you can afford to try other things—various kinds of paid ads or search engine optimization or social media or whatever you want to try.

Each of those is an experiment—an optional way to inject True Fans into your Virtuous Cycle. If they work, great! If they don’t, abandon them and try something else.

What you never want to do is abandon your Virtuous Cycle. Like diamonds, your Virtuous Cycle is forever.

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