Setting Realistic Writing Goals for the New Year!

Happy New Year!

As we kick off 2025, I personally have about a thousand things that I'd like to accomplish over the next three hundred and sixty five days. Many of the other authors and writers that I talk to are feeling the same.

The beginning of the year always holds the promise of new beginnings. Starting over. The possibilities of what can be accomplished are limitless. If you're a dreamer (like yours truly), then it can truly feel like the entire world is at your feet come January first. And that's amazing! We need more people who refuse to limit their dreams. Who adamantly refuse to believe in the possibility of failure. Big dreamers are the people that change the world.

That being said, sometimes the sheer size of my dreams can become overwhelming, leading me to completely shut down. Then, I get nothing done that I wanted to, and end up in a spiral of disappointment and negativity. And that is definitely not the energy that I want to bring into this new year. So, how do I plan to combat that, and how can you do it too?

How to Achieve Your Writing Goals in 2025

Find Your Big Picture

As with any endeavor, the first step is to figure out what your goals are. What do you want to accomplish? I like to start with the "big picture" goal. This is the ultimate end goal. For example, is your goal to finish your book? To get a certain number of sales of your paperback? Or maybe it's simply to write every day. When you first set out to accomplish something, figuring out the ultimate end goal might be a little difficult. Here are some questions you can ask yourself to figure out your big picture goal:

• What do I want my life to look like a year from now?

• What does success look like to me?

• In the future, what accomplishment am I the proudest of?

This is the stage to really lean in to your delusions of grandeur. Believe with your whole heart that you can achieve anything. Come on, we're writers! We create worlds and plots and love and death and magic from just our minds. Why should we limit our imaginations only to what we can imagine for our characters? Create your own world for yourself.

For me, I want to republish my romance novel series and actually promote them to a wider audience than my friends and family. Don't get me wrong, I am forever grateful for my family and friends that already bought copies, but I really want to get them to a wider audience and see success from my book sales. And by success, I mean success. I want to become a bestselling author. I believe in my writing and my stories, and I think that people would love them, so I'm allowing myself to dream of being a phenomenally successful author. That's my big picture.

Create Realistic and Actionable Goals

Now that we've got our big picture goal, it's time to break that down into smaller goals with action items. I'm sure we've all heard of SMART goals by this point. It's 2025, and SMART goals have been the cornerstone of business motivational posters for years. However, if you don't know what SMART goals are (or why I'm shouting SMART at you every other sentence), it's actually an anagram!

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Relevant

Time-Bound

I poo-pooed this method when I first heard of it, but I finally started putting it into practice and it's actually been really helpful. By breaking down the big picture goal into smaller, SMART goals, it's easier to see actual progress. Plus, it is beyond satisfying to get to check goals off as you accomplish them.

For my goal of world-domination, I'm starting with republishing my series of romance novels. I have self-published the first two, and just finished writing the third, and to me it just made sense to take everything that I've learned over the last few years of my self-publishing journey and do things better this time around.

There are a lot of moving parts to this, so I've set myself some smaller goals that will make it more manageable. The first thing I'm doing is rewriting and re-editing my first two novels. Great goal! Now let's make it SMART.

• Prepare Truly & Deeply for republication by adding 10k words and reformatting manuscript by 1/20/2025.

It's specific to which book I need to focus on, measurable with the word count, achievable and relevant to my overall goal, and has a reasonable deadline.

Make a Game Plan

Now that I gave a more specific goal, we can plan how to make it happen. This, for me, is the fun part. Putting money where my dreams are. That's because I need structure in my life, otherwise I would never get anything done.

Working on just my SMART goal outlined above, I am working on Truly & Deeply every day, rereading it and adding content where necessary. Then I will go through and re-edit and reformat it. I have blocked out one hour every day that is solely dedicated to this goal.

Whatever your smaller goal is, figure out how to make it work with whatever your schedule looks like. If you work a full-time job, have kids or other people that you take care of, or are working on a million things at once, if you can spare even 15 minutes a day you're still making progress.

Another great thing to include in your game plan is an accountability buddy. Whether that's a family member, a friend, or another author, having someone to check-in with and update on your goal progress has been proven to help people achieve more. Personally, I have a very good friend who is also a writer and we keep each other updated on what we're working on and how close to achieving our goals we are. It's also just really nice to have someone to talk to about writing and storytelling and the entire publication process. To bounce ideas off of, and commiserate with.

Commit to Your 2025 Writing Goals

However you commit to your goal, the most important thing is to really commit. No excuses, no dilly-dallying or procrastinating. You spent all this time coming up with a killer game plan, and it would be a shame to waste that. Because here's the thing - if you've made it this far into this post, you must be pretty serious about your writing this year. And if you're that serious, then I have no doubt you will accomplish all your goals. I believe in you. So I'm gonna need you to believe in yourself just as much, okay?

Happy New Year. Happy 2025.

Happy Writing!