Week 22 in the bag. I had a good week. I got good words and made progress.

The Words

I showed up daily. It is awesome what a writing challenge does for your word count. I started a 100 Days of Writing on May first and asked people to join me. It might have been a little selfish on my part for accountability, but I needed it.

This week has been awesome for words. I did have a couple of low days, but they were when life was lifing. We had a fantastic week of weather and I took advantage of that and spent some time with the kids and the grandkids. I have to remind myself that the reason I do this is freedom.

I was hoping to finish the book in the last week of May, but because of said time off, I’m a little behind on that. This feels like the never-ending book. I hope my next book isn’t like that. I have it on pre-order for August. Yikes. I can feel deadlines approaching. I really hope I don’t screw them up.

Substack

I am loving writing on Substack. I have so many articles I’ve written that I haven’t posted yet. They need editing, but once my brain gets a topic, I get a ton of ideas to write more. I love how when we get into it, writing one feeds into the next and the next and the ideas just grow. If anyone asks where I get my ideas, the answer is by writing and reading a lot.

I’m now at seven paid subscribers, which is awesome. I never went into writing on here with a goal, or with the idea to grow. I just wanted to write shit and maybe people wanted to read shit. But I love it.

I have also been reading Substack. I love reading it. She had a divorce in the last few years and she’s just turned into a new decade of her life. I think there is something weird that happens when we hit forty. We start realising that all the stuff we thought mattered before is mostly bullshit. I love reading how she is finding herself, almost like watching her shake off the shackles of others in her life so she can come out the other side as who she really is. She inspired me to think about doing my own Substack for that, for myself. I have lots of reflections on my own life, lots of lessons. So maybe. We’ll see.

Facebook Ads

These are doing awesome. I almost feel like I’m doing them wrong. Like they should be harder and more complicated.

I’ve been using ChatGPT to get me good hooks and ad copy. Yes, I gave it my entire book and asked it to pull viral stuff out for me. I’ve also been reading Theodora Taylor’s book, Butter Blurbs, because an ad is pretty much like a blurb. What I learnt there, I chatted to ChatGPT about, and we changed my blurbs. We also used some of that butter language in my ads. My sales continue to go up. I scaled up. That ad is just starting to hit now. So we’ll see.

My mantra for this week is: I will finish my book.

June Writing Challenge

I’m still doing my 100 Days of Writing, so there are 69 days left. If anyone wants to come along and write for the month of June, or work on edits, or plotting, or just have some accountability, come on over and join us. It’s all free. Just fun and figuring it out together.

Join here

So that’s week twenty-two. How was yours?

Week Twenty-Two: Numbers

Word Count Goal: Anything between 14,000 and 20,000 words.

• Fiction (Project Dark): 22,801

• Non-fiction: 3,076

• Total: 25,877

Goals Check-In

• Writing seven-day streak: Yes!

• Lose 1 pound: Lost 1.5.

• 1 Substack post that isn’t Year in the Life: Yes. Substack Growth post.

• Read daily: Yes!

• Novel Gains seven-day streak: Sporadic.

Week Twenty-Three: Focus

• Writing seven-day streak

• Lose 1 pound

• Edit and post course videos

• 1 Substack post that isn’t Year in the Life

• Read daily

• Novel Gains seven-day streak

Running Totals

• Words: 489,386 (214,519 fiction / 87,729 non-fiction / 187,130 edits)

• Pounds lost: 4

• Books read: 4

Apparently I missed a couple of weeks, or lost track along the way. I looked up what week of the year we’re in now, and we’ve just finished week 21, but I thought it was week 20. I considered writing backwards for each of those missed weeks, but instead I think, no. I’ll just recap them all, do a catch-up, and then I’m fresh. I knew when I started this that I’d miss the odd week here and there, and that’s okay. As long as I’m not beating myself up for it and feeling guilt, it’s okay.

I’ve felt a little all over the place these last couple of weeks too. I’ve been scrolling more than I’d like, which is always a thing that kind of makes everything else feel off. I really wish I could beat the scroll. That picking up my phone when I don’t need it. It’s like a drug I can’t shake. I don’t need to be always connected. But then my mind goes, what if you miss something, and I might. But then, from scrolling I have gained things. It’s a cycle, right? I just know I hate how much I pick up my phone. One daily check should be okay. I can check if I have messages, if there’s anything that needs my attention. But it never stops at one check, does it?

100 Days of Writing

I’ve been carrying on with my 100 days of writing, and I can say at the time of writing this, which is the 26th of May, that I have written every day so far. I’m a quarter of the way in. You can still join us by the way. No one says you have to do all 100 days, but maybe you want the accountability. The link is here.

I’ve written over 90k words so far in the month of May. A lot of those have been non-fiction, but a lot has been fiction too. I even had a day where I hit 17k. But that was all dictation. I couldn’t believe the number when I hit it.

I’ve also been doing a lot of rewriting. The book I’m working on didn’t feel right. And I know as an author, when something doesn’t feel right, not to ignore that. Otherwise it’s like my muse hits the brakes and I stop somewhere in the story. So I went back, did a lot of rewrites, and got the story back to where it was. I’d really love to finish this book by the end of the month. That’s six days. Hard, but doable if I sit down and put my mind to it. Of course, we’re hot here in the UK now, so sitting down and writing with the heat isn’t helping.

Facebook Ads

I’ve still been ploughing on with my Facebook ads. I’ve not had to redo these ones, and they’ve hit that nice steady income level where they seem to float around. I’d like to up that a little and scale, but scaling is scary. I get worried I might tank my ads, or I might lower the ROI. It’s a struggle to break through the ceiling I created for myself. Book 1 of my advertised series sits at around 307 on the .com site and around 258 on the UK site. I’d like to push it up. I might sit with Claude and see which ad is best, then duplicate it and throw another drop in the water.

Taking Time Off

I’ve been making sure to take time off too. You know, it’s so easy to work all of the time, and then to just get in this hamster wheel of must make more, must do this. But I reminded myself the whole reason I write and do this is so I can have freedom. And what is the point in freedom if I don’t take it?

The Planner

I’ve been working on a planner this year. I used to order myself a planner from America. I love the Happy Planner brand. I first saw it when I was in America, but it’s so expensive now to get those shipped over here. I decided to make my own. To actually learn Indesign, and so far so good. I’ve been using it these past five months. I wonder if anyone else would be interested in it.

BookVault

I’ve also tested BookVault these past couple of weeks. I decided to go all out and do foil and sprayed edges. My god, the sprayed edges were a learning curve. Luckily I know how to use Photoshop, so I think, I hope, I managed to lift all the right things and create the foil layer they needed. I’ll let you know when it comes. It cost me about £15 to order it. I’m waiting on it, it’s being processed. The processing time is long, but I know that’s because it has a lot of special things to it. I’m thinking maybe just sprayed edges next time? I got a new cover for this book, so it really is a special edition of it. I’ll keep you posted.

SPS London and My First Writing Retreat

As I write this, I’m also two weeks out from SPS London. I can’t wait for that. I love conferences. And as of yesterday, I was awarded a scholarship to go to my very first writing retreat. I have never been to one. They’re always about £700 a ticket, which isn’t a bad price for what you get, but I always get a little anxious about going.

But this is like anything. I remember starting as an indie author, having a pen name and not saying who I was because of fear. And then I went to my first conference and kind of stood in the corner and stayed away. Who knew in my adulthood, shyness would be a thing? I wasn’t shy when I was in my late teens and early twenties. Now I go to conferences and people come over to meet me because they’ve listened to my podcast, or they’ve followed my YouTube. I know this retreat will be like that. I’ll go, be nervous, but I’ll love it beyond words. I thank Craig Martelle and the anonymous donor for my place. It’s not till July. Of course, I’ll report back how it was.

Week Twenty-Two

My goals for this week are simple. Writing a bloody lot and finishing my book. That’s it really. Of course, the usual little things too, like Substacks, and lose a pound or two, and read.

The numbers below are the last three weeks, so they look damn impressive.

Weeks Nineteen, Twenty and Twenty-One: Numbers

Word Count Goal: Anything between 14,000 and 20,000 words.

Week 19

• Fiction (Project Dark): 16,719

• Non-fiction: 2,256

• Total: 18,975

Week 20

• Fiction (Project Dark): 27,877

• Non-fiction: 5,720

• Total: 33,597

Week 21

• Fiction (Project Dark): 19,199

• Non-fiction: 6,932

• Total: 26,131

Running Totals

Words: 463,509 (191,718 fiction / 84,653 non-fiction / 187,130 edits) Pounds lost: 2 Books read: 4

This means on my million words for the year I’m at 276,379 words. I should be at exactly 400,000 today, so I’m 123,621 words behind. However, I have a good, better, and bloody amazing goal.

Good: 750k (23,621 words behind)

Better: 850k (63,621 words behind)

Bloody Amazing: 1 million

This week’s updates cover Facebook ads, 100 days of writing, the dictation course, and a good old reminder to take days off. Oh, and I did some writing. Yay me.

Facebook Ads

My Facebook ads didn’t last long. They grew, grew, grew, and then boom, died. I was breaking even again, which is okay. As long as I’m not losing, I’m not complaining.

I have a philosophy on breaking even. If I’m spending £100 on ads and selling 100 ebooks at £1, I’m getting 100 new readers into my ecosystem. Some of them will go on to read the next books in the series. I see people who don’t like the even break, but it isn’t a terrible thing. That said, my goal is still to make a profit.

So I dumped my ads and made new ones. I went back to the original image that worked well on my tired ad and made a new iteration of it. I tested it with a small budget in the UK and the US. As it grew and became profitable, I scaled it up a little. So far, fingers crossed, the money is going in the right direction and I’m hitting a 2:1 ratio on pounds spent.

I’ve also seen a few videos and reports from people trying Blake Hudson’s way of doing ads. I’m going to give those a watch this week and see what I can learn from him and his approach with his wife’s books. I’ll probably test extra ads, or try them on the series I just can’t seem to make profitable. When I put ads on it, the sales go up, but it doesn’t even break even. I need to figure out the sticking point. I’ll have another crack at the blurb on Amazon and see if I can dial it in. I know it’s a good story. Those who read it, read the series. But there’s a disconnect somewhere, and from my experience working with authors, that disconnect is almost always the Amazon page.

100 Days of Writing

It’s been a good month since I did any real fiction writing, which isn’t great with my goal to hit one million words this year. But I allowed myself to do what was needed, and that was edits and then my course. Now the course is recorded and I just need to edit the videos. It’s time to get back to the words. Especially with a pre-order booked next month and a book that needs finishing. Yikes.

The ticking clock is real. We’ve done a full four months of the year and I haven’t had a new release yet. I’m not on path for my six books published, though it depends if you count my audiobook release. I’m counting it. One down.

All of this hit around the end of April and I thought, sod this. Time to challenge myself and lean into that achiever brain. So I created a 100 Days of Writing and asked others to join me. It doesn’t have to be writing. It’s 100 days of working on your book. Edits, plotting, whatever you need. I wanted some accountability. It’s here if you’d like to join us. We’re only a little way in.

100 days of writing

Dictation Course

I’ve reached the dictation module and I’m putting it up a little at a time. Partly for pacing for the betas, partly so I can review each section properly. Every part of the fourth module is longer and more in depth, as it’s the actual learning of dictation.

I love that people are messaging me using dictation in their replies and comments on the Skool. If you’ve ever wanted to try dictation, come and check this out. The feedback has been awesome.

The one thing I need to get across better is the message: don’t jump straight into your WIP. I’m seeing it happen, and I know they’ll hit roadblocks because they’re skipping ahead too much.

Substack

My three Substack articles are still going strong. I love that. I’ve had some pushback on one of them this week, more than usual, but I don’t mind as long as it isn’t hateful and accusatory. I’ll delete the shit out of anyone being nasty. Healthy debate is welcome.

I also have another article I’m trying to get right, but it just isn’t working. I’ve written it twice already and it’s still not saying what I want it to say. That’s this week’s job.

Life

Yesterday was a bank holiday and for the first time in ages, I took a true day off. I did write in the car on the way home, because 100 Days of Writing. But everything else, nope.

I went to the Lake District with my son, his wife, and the grand monsters. We took the dog, who had a fab time and loved her two portions of ice cream. Normally I’d work the bank holiday, but I reminded myself that this is why I work for myself. I have freedom. And it’s worth nothing if I don’t use it.

So I enjoyed the day. Took lots of annoying grandma pictures. Made some memories with the little ones. Good chats and catching up with my son and daughter-in-law. Time well spent.

So that’s week eighteen. How was yours?

Week Eighteen: Numbers

Word Count Goal: Anything between 14,000 and 20,000 words.

• Fiction (Project Dark): 16,644

• Non-fiction: 1,884

• Total: 18,528

Goals Check-In

• Writing seven-day streak: Yes!

• Gym 3x: Zero.

• Lose 1 pound: Half a pound.

• Record and post 1 YouTube video: I’ve really dropped the ball here.

• 1 Substack post that isn’t Year in the Life: Yes.

• Read daily: Yes! I’m reading Wing Weaver.

• Novel Gains seven-day streak: Sporadic.

Week Nineteen: Focus

• Writing seven-day streak

• Lose 1 pound

• Edit and post course videos

• 1 Substack post that isn’t Year in the Life

• Read daily

• Novel Gains seven-day streak

Running Totals

• Words: 384,806 (127,923 fiction / 69,745 non-fiction / 187,130 edits)

• Pounds lost: 2

• Books read: 4

Year in the Life: Week Seventeen

These weeks are rolling in, and I’m actually getting to a stage now where I’m itching to get back to writing some books. It’s been weeks I think now of not actually getting any fiction. And I know I can let myself, but I also know that I work better if I have a single project to focus on, so these last couple of weeks it has been doing the dictation course.

Dictation course recording

I am so happy I got all of those videos recorded now. On Saturday, I did a big batch of recording and got through them all, though I’m not sure I’m too happy with the content of the last couple of modules in my course. I’ll see when I go to edit them.

I guess in a way it was my own fault. I had the script I wanted to say, but I didn’t dictate it back to myself. I think, especially non-fiction wise when we try to mimic how we talk by writing it, it can be different. I was running out of time this week. Normally I’ll write a script or bulletpoints of what I want to say and then I’ll dictate it back to myself. But then I think that is almost like a second draft, and because I like to double draft everything, I think not getting that double draft made the scripts, (and the videos), feel a little weak.

They might not be, though. I know from years of writing that sometimes I can sit and write for the day, and everything I write feels like it’s terrible and all I want to do is delete it and go home. But when I come to it the next day, it’s perfectly fine. So sometimes it is just mood, and I was probably tired. The eldest daughter got engaged, and the night before we’d been at a party to celebrate that, so maybe it was tiredness from that.

Pen name balance and a narrator

I guess I’m happy to say I haven’t done much of anything else this week. I did pick a narrator for Jigsaw Girl. He’s accepted.

However, it has been a couple of years since Book 1 came out.

Balancing two pen names is hard, especially when most of my series are more heavily weighted on the other one. This year really has to be the year for finishing series on the other side of things, so I can focus on things here. I have books 2 and 3 planned out for Alex Rogan and I’m excited to do them, but I really can’t let myself until I have completed books and series on my other name.

I get a little frustrated sometimes, because the brain wants the new shiny thing, and I have to not let myself.

Facebook ads

Maybe I cracked them, maybe I didn’t.

At the end of the week before, and the start of this week I’m reporting on, I had some new ads. They were awesome and shiny and new. Then one got banned by Facebook. My first ever to do that. Even though they didn’t block the other versions of it (other versions were country change. That’s it). Weird.

The others were running, but they were massively overspending. Example, I had one set to £30 a day, and it was spending £44 a day, which is perhaps okay on it’s own, but they were all doing that. I have no idea what was going on. Also, I wasn’t seeing a positive ROI. It felt like bleeding money, so I turned them all off.

I sat down midweek and redid all of my ads. Going over each one, the stats etc, and jiggling basically. I think that was around Thursday perhaps. I did have a couple of days where ads were turned off.

Side note: I did make the mistake of creating my ads in the evening and forgetting to give them a time to go live, so of course, Facebook spent the entire day’s ad budget in about 2 hours, because it clearly had a goal to meet.

Tip. If making ads at night, set them to go live after midnight. Rookie mistake.

These ads are better, though. It’s another six. I’m targeting three book ones, and a series page. I can see that series page ad has more saves so far this weekend than all my other ads, which is awesome. The ROI has started to climb. Day one of the new ads, I broke even. Day two it climbed some. Not massively. And day three, royalties were almost double my spend, so that was nice that it jumped quickly.

I’m hoping this is a good sign and that they’re working. And while the ads have a lot of likes, I’m not seeing so many comments this time.

TikTok

I also had a random TikTok video pop off. Every time I went on my account, I had tons of likes. It was weird. I looked at my recent TikToks and the views were like 700 ish, which didn’t make sense for the notifications, so I did a scroll and found that it was a random one from maybe three weeks back that had gathered some traction. I swear, you can’t predict anything. That video had also been sitting at the 700ish.

I’m not complaining though. It’s got me sales in my TikTok Shop, as it’s a product linked video.

Substack

This has been going amazingly well. Since I posted my stop policing people substack, I’ve had other posts really go, and I wrote one on Draft2Digital. It has also garnered me 3 paid subscribers. Thank you so much, I appreciate you. And one of them paid for a total year.

I also charted with my Substack at number 44 in Arts.

Habits and life

I know life has knocked my habits these last couple of weeks and I feel it. Not getting to bed on time, not eating right, not enough exercise and scrolling too much. It really is amazing how these things just get undone at the simplest thing.

But with the son’s hand and the daughter’s party and all the other things in between. I have four children. Three of them have needed things. (They’re adults by the way. I’m not leaving little ones to themselves haha.) Oldest son, hand. Oldest daughter, party organisation (I cooked all of the food for the party). Youngest son, girlfriend break up. He’s staying with us. I will not poke the youngest daughter’s life haha. In fact, no wait. She wasn’t well last week and needed some help. Yep, so all four kids.

I’m not complaining, don’t get me wrong. I love I have a relationship with them all, that I am their go to person. I didn’t have that so much at their ages. But it’s so much easier when kids are little. Their problems are so much smaller.

Oh, and I went to see Michael with the youngest son this week. Fantastic film.

Wrapping up

I think that’s it for this week. I have 27 videos left to edit for my course and upload them. I hope the course really teaches people dictation. I’m going to try to get words in between the edits this week, though editing the videos has to be my main priority.

The numbers

Word count goal: Anything between 14,000 and 20,000 words.

• Fiction (Project Dark): 0. I’m working on my course.

• Non-fiction: 21,229

• Total: 21,229

Goals check-in

• Writing seven-day streak: Yes!

• Gym 3x: Yes. Finally!

• Lose 1 pound: Plus ½ pound. Hectic weeks.

• Edit and post course videos: Yes. So many of them.

• Record and post 1 YouTube video: Working on my course.

• 1 Substack post that isn’t Year in the Life: Yes. Regarding Draft2Digital.

• Read daily: Yes! I’m reading Wing Weaver.

• Novel Gains seven-day streak: No, but I did do many days.

Week Eighteen focus

• Writing seven-day streak (write some fiction)

• Lose 1 pound

• Edit and post course videos

• 1 Substack post that isn’t Year in the Life

• Read daily

• Novel Gains seven-day streak

Running totals

• Words: 387,499 (111,279 fiction / 89,090 non-fiction / 187,130 edits)

• Pounds lost: 1 (this is going the wrong way!)

• Books read: 4 (I need to get more reading in.)

I did write last week’s post, just never posted it. But it had a lot in, so I think I’ll post both of these weeks separately, because I’ve been busy on both.

This week I’ve worked on my dictation course and my ads. That’s it really.

My son had his surgery on his hand and that’s been sorted. He’s fine. All bandaged up. They were able to fix everything and are happy that his hand should heal nicely. The only thing he lost was the nail from his little finger, but the surgeon said that should grow back in about six months.

Facebook Ads

I noticed my sales were dipping and I always wonder if it’s the ads when I see a lot of people online report the same, or if it’s just something funky going on with Amazon for the time being. Either way, I did a refresh of my ads and I upped the spend on them.

I’d talked with Claude about it. I gave him my data from my ads page on Meta, and also my information from KDP, my links, and all the fun stuff he needs to go over. I’ve had quite a few ads running. It was scary to see that every day when I got my “you’ve spent this much” message from Facebook Ads, the amount was over double every day. But this is because I’ve scaled, and I’ve never really upped that much. I had to remind myself that this was also the income increasing too.

However, a couple of days in, and while my sales were up, my ROI had dropped a lot. I’m not sure if that’s because many of the ads were in learning phase, but it was a little frustrating. I did check my ACX dashboard too, for my audiobook sales. They’re nicely growing, though not as much. I don’t think I’ve beaten the two weeks in March yet for the whole of April. But I remind myself that this is extra income from my IP.

I need to sit down and have another go at my ads. It’s just in time too, because Steve Aitchison (you’re going to get sick of me mentioning him) just put out a video in his paid newsletter showing what he does, so I may go in and have a look at that. I’ve also noticed that we’re on another iteration of the Matthew Holmes course, which I also need to go through.

Dictation Course

Last week I was heavy into working on my scripts and getting all the modules set up in the Skool app. I have those all done now. I found the hardest module to build was the main how-to-dictate one. Mostly because I’ve been dictating for a decade and I was trying to figure out how to get all the knowledge out of my head and into a course that wasn’t a pile of chaos.

I did it in the end, and yes, I used Claude to help me figure it out.

Over the weekend, I spent a lot of hours building it. I dictated my scripts, worked on each module description, and then yesterday I spent some good few hours recording. I recorded a lot, and was very happy with it as I got through four and a half modules of recording. Now I have two and a half left. I’m hoping to get those done tomorrow evening (Tuesday) when there is no one in my house.

I also edited the entire first module and got that live, and got through almost all of module two’s video. I let Claude select ten betas for me, because I looked at the names and I didn’t just want to pick people I know. So I thought, let’s give all the names to Claude and he can do it. So he did. I invited them and created a feedback form for them to complete.

I’ve had a couple back so far, and it’s very useful. I am looking forward to getting it done and released, but also to getting back to writing. Between edits, and this course, and going to Ireland, I haven’t really worked on any of my fiction. I can feel my muse champing at the bit for it.

Other Bits

• Jigsaw Girl auditions. Yikes, I have so many more auditions to listen to, but I still haven’t been able to sit down and listen. That’s on this week’s plan.

• Project Fangs. The audio for the next book is well under way.

• The year is going too fast. I have books on pre-order, and time is ticking away.

Week Sixteen: Numbers

Word Count Goal: Anything between 14,000 and 20,000 words.

• Fiction (Project Dark): 2,265 — I’m working on my course.

• Non-fiction: 17,579

• Total: 19,844

Goals Check-In

• Writing seven-day streak: Yes!

• Gym 3x: Yes! Once.

• Lose 1 pound: Plus 1. Hectic weeks.

• Record and post 1 YouTube video: I recorded a million videos for my course. Does this count?

• 1 Substack post that isn’t Year in the Life: Nope.

• Read daily: Yes! I’m reading Wing Weaver.

• Novel Gains seven-day streak: Don’t ask!

Week Seventeen: Focus

• Writing seven-day streak

• Lose 1 pound

• Edit and post course videos

• Record YouTube video

• 1 Substack post that isn’t Year in the Life

• Read daily

• Novel Gains seven-day streak

Running Totals

• Words: 366,270 (111,279 fiction / 67,861 non-fiction / 187,130 edits)

• Pounds lost: 1.5 (This is going the wrong way!)

• Books read: 4

What a week. That’s all I can say. It has been mad busy. It’s Monday as I write this and I am so, so tired. But I have some updates.

First, if you follow me on Facebook, you might have seen that my son had an accident. He’s a gardener, and he went through two of his fingers with a hedge trimmer. He’s okay, but we’re waiting for the plastic surgeon to call us to fix them. He’s severed the top of his pinky and hacked right into the ring finger. The bones are also broken. Luckily, he isn’t in any pain and the surgeon is confident they can fix the fingers. We’re just waiting on a slot for surgery.

So yeah, that was my week. This week was meant to be a nice, calm, get ready for PASCIFY event. It was everything but calm. But I did it.

Facebook Ads

Before I talk about PASCIFY and all the exciting stuff, let me start with ads.

I noticed in March that my sales were getting a little less on average. I was still in a positive ROI, so I wasn’t worried, but the sales were going down, which meant the profit was going down, and that is not the way I want it to go.

I guess it was about time. I haven’t refreshed my ads in ages because they were working, and why fix something that isn’t broken? The only time I did anything with an ad was to duplicate a successful one and add another drop in the ocean to the book marketing pond. I did go over the ads and found one of those duplications that wasn’t really working, so I turned that off. It did knock my sales down a touch, but that ad itself was only breaking even.

I had to face it. I needed to make more ads. I don’t know why I avoid it. It isn’t like I hate it, or that it’s bad to do.

Luckily, I’ve just been to the Ireland Publishing Show and I got to listen to Steve Higgs talk about synthetic audiences to test your ads. But it wasn’t that so much that resonated. It was the chatter after. People asking him about his ad spend, killing ads, testing them. So it’s with those things I learnt there that I’m applying here. Also, Steve Aitchison has been testing some new style of ads, so I was reading what he had to say on his Substack. All good.

I have six new ads running now. I did leave some of my old ones on. It feels weird to have so many ads running. I don’t ever really have a ton of them going. Mostly, fear. Weird, I know, but it’s there. I always find new ads take a couple of days to embed themselves. I can say these went live maybe Thursday and Friday, and my sales have gone in an upward trajectory again. I just need to take a minute to see which ones are working and which aren’t.

I’m also thinking I might do what James Blatch did, and do an audit of my sales data. He talks about it on his podcast, using Claude to assess everything. It’d be good. It can probably teach me properly about how to assess my ads. I think I know, but then I doubt myself and think, maybe I have no idea. Either self-doubt is winning, or I need to learn some things.

Jigsaw Audio

I put Jigsaw Girl into ACX for an audiobook royalty share audition. My gosh, I have so many auditions. It’s only been up a few days and I have 25 of them. I get about 3-5 a day. I need to sit and listen, but I admit, I get a bit bored listening to the same chapter over and over again. I’m like, wow, choose another part.

Someone did send me an audio and they were like, I recorded this on my phone, but when I do your book, I’ll use proper equipment. Which has me thinking, if you were really wanting this gig, wouldn’t you show me the best you can do? Maybe that’s just my Gen X brain, which thinks you show up at your best at auditions and interview things. I don’t know.

The debate I also have is whether to have a female or male narrator. It’s third person, so it’s not giving the character a voice, but it is a male detective.

Dictation Course

This is coming along nicely. I didn’t get to work on it as much as I’d have liked last week, but that’s just with it all being hectic. I have got my outline finalised, and I’ve mapped out how to do it so it covers people who discovery write and those who also plot. I wanted to include pantsers with this, as all the courses I see talk about outlining. They get very, you can’t dictate if you don’t outline. I’m here to tell them that isn’t true and show writers how it can be done.

PASCIFY

What can I say. This was wonderful. Wow. I had such an amazing time.

This is an author/reader event, if you don’t know. It’s like RARE, but for paranormal and sci-fi. There were over 100 authors and vendors there and the event had sold about a thousand tickets. It was a long, hard, tiring day, but still awesome.

I went there with my little publisher brand so we could cover the three author names under it, and I’m so glad I did. I ordered a load of stock. I wasn’t sure how much to order really, but then figured, what does it matter if I order too much? I can sell it on TikTok, or go to another event. It’s not like it’s food and it’s going to expire.

I did accidentally order one book twice, which was funny. It was a stand-alone book, and I knew I needed to order copies, so I did, forgetting that I had already ordered them the week before with my first round of books. But you know what, luckily I did. Because bar one copy, they all sold. In fact, I think that book was my second best selling book, because they all loved it. They loved the cover, and that’s what drew them to the books.

That’s one thing this taught me. How important your covers are. I mean, I already knew it, but when the readers are walking past, it was the covers that stopped them.

I’d also done a pre-order before I went, and so I had a lot of orders that way. It was nice to meet people who had done that. I had a reader come up to me who had read my book already, but she wanted to buy a signed physical copy and then a picture with me. I think she made my day as much as I made hers.

It’s weird to be on the other side, but it was amazing. I had someone come up to me who’d read my Substack post too. The one about policing each other. I was waiting to see if she wanted to tell me I was wrong, or if she was thankful. But she thanked me for writing it.

So that’s week fifteen. Busy, chaotic, proud. How was yours?

Week Fifteen: Numbers

Word Count Goal: Anything between 14,000 and 20,000 words.

• Fiction (Project Dark): 3,914 — I’m working on my course.

• Non-fiction: 1,487

• Total: 5,401

Goals Check-In

• Writing seven-day streak: Yes!

• Gym 3x: Still no.

• Lose 1 pound: 0

• Record and post 1 YouTube video: I’ve not even touched YouTube.

• 1 Substack post that isn’t Year in the Life: No

• Read daily: Yes! I’m listening to Chasing Love.

• Novel Gains seven-day streak: Glares at self

Running Totals

• Words: 346,426 (109,014 fiction / 50,282 non-fiction / 187,130 edits)

• Pounds lost: 2.5

• Books read: 4

This week was better than the week before, both in terms of work and the mental side of things. Last week I was deep in comparison mode, so I took myself off the internet. No scrolling. That always works.

I still haven’t planned quarter two. I need to print off my planner and get it all down. But it’s been busy, and here’s why.

The Event

I’ve spent a lot of this week getting ready of PASCIFY.

I have my first in-person event at the end of this week, and because it’s my first, everything is coming from scratch. Roller banners, signs, gift bags, giveaways. All of it designed, ordered, and prepped from nothing.

I also realised I have about thirty books with old covers on them. I’m not going to sell them on TikTok Shop. Or I might, in lives. I’m not decided. But for now, I wrapped them up, put them in bags with some old logo merch, and decided they can go to the event as a blind date with an author. Three books in a bag, discontinued packaging, but the stories are still the same. If someone picks one up, they get three books cheap, some bonus bits, and we’re both happy.

What really got me though was seeing the stacks. All of them. I’d ordered a massive amount, which in itself was scary. I’ve never put such a big order of my own books in before. But seeing them in piles and thinking, you know what, I wrote all of that. That right there is the last fourteen years of work. I let myself take a moment to feel proud, and I did. The series all together. The books all together. I made that.

I have no expectations for the event. Lots of hopes. And I’m going to go and enjoy it.

Branding

I’ve been focusing a little on branding. If you follow my podcast, with co-host Rob Radcliffe, you might have heard the episode he lovingly called the anti-branding episode. He went through my books and the covers and ripped hell out of them. He wasn’t wrong. I’d written a big series and each cover had changed slightly as I’d changed. Better covers, new ideas, different designers. All great individually, but the end product meant you couldn’t tell the books were in the same series.

I’ve been reading Steve Aitchison’s newsletter on branding, and Ines Johnson’s stuff on it too, and I’ve been putting the work in. Getting headers and images consistent. Making covers match. It’s a work in progress, but it’s happening.

I’m laughing at myself, because you’d think at this stage I’d have everything right. But my whole career has been a growth thing. I started in the early days of KDP, and I’ve changed with every change the industry has thrown at me. I guess the result is a lot of things looking messy. Until now.

Edits Done

The series edits are finished. Yay me. New versions are all on Amazon, so anyone who buys now gets the best version. Not that the old ones were bad, but I've grown in my craft and I wanted to go back and make sure these were the best I could possibly have them. I've added chapters here and there, deleted others. Nothing that changes the plot. I'm happy with them now.

Audio

I also had my DCI Alex Rogan book up on ACX for auditions. I’ve had a few come in. I had one guy do an awesome job, but I’m not sure I like how he did the accents of the characters. My characters are northern English, and for some reason, many narrators give them a Yorkshire accent, which isn’t how my characters sound. They need more of a Manchester accent. Think Christopher Eccleston.

My other audiobook I put out in March is still going strong. I had a panic for the first few days of April as no sales were showing, but then it updated, I guess it has some kid of lag, and it’s continuing to sell at the rate it did in its first two weeks.

Ads

Weirdly though, my Amazon sales have dropped a little. I need to go in and mess with my ads. I’ve turned two of them off and left my best performing one on. I’m thinking to make some video adverts. When I was in Ireland, I learnt some things about ads I’d like to try. I did pop up one video yesterday, but it came back that the parameters were wrong, and I was too tired to bother messing with it. So that’s this week. Get some ads up.

I don’t know if I should turn my ad off that has lots of social proof on it. It’s still generating sales, but the ROI has come down a little. I’m not sure. I’ll have to go and check numbers. The ad is over a year old now, so to have it come this far is amazing, I guess.

The AI Post

I had a good week for Substack. My head was in the mood for topics, partly because I saw something that made me properly angry. One author publicly accused another of using an AI cover. The accused author said they didn’t. Author one doubled down, screenshotted the cover and the conversation, took it to their own page, and got all their mates to pile on.

In case you missed it.

Rachel Morton

The Self-Appointed Police of the Author World

There’s a thing that happens in the author world every so often…

Read more

3 months ago · 77 likes · 23 comments · Rachel Morton

Why? Why was author one not busy focusing on their own work? Why did they feel they had the right to do that? It’s not the first time I’ve seen it happen. So I got mad and I wrote a post.

By the time I finished writing, I’d cooled off a bit. I thought, shit, do I actually post this? So I scheduled it for later in the week, figuring I’d think on it and could always delete it. Then I forgot about it. It went out on Thursday. Within minutes, restacks and comments started rolling in.

And then, of course, the fear of success kicked in. Isn’t that hilarious? Why am I afraid to succeed? That’s something I need to unpack. I’ve read The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, the idea that we sabotage ourselves when things start going well. If I take away my own success, no one else can take it from me. And I know where this comes from. Being creative as a kid was seen as having your head in the clouds.

So I made myself leave the article up. I chose to enjoy every notification, every comment, every restack. Turns out writing angry is the way to go.

Dictation Course

Next up, the dictation course. I had it outlined about a year ago, but I don’t think I was treating it like a real project. More like a side quest. That changes now. I’m going to give myself proper time to nail down what I want to say, then record everything.

I’m thinking $97 to launch, then $147 once I’ve had some students through the doors. I’ll be asking for beta testers too. A lot of people have offered. I can’t give it to all of them, but I’m thinking a handful get it free, and the rest of those who offered can have it for $47 or something like that. I’ll run the numbers past Al and see what he thinks.

Words

I've got a book I'm on act three for. The plan is to work on the course during the day and write the book in the evenings, just to keep the words ticking over. I'm on day 64 of my writing streak on 4TheWords, and I don't want to break it.at go.

So that’s week fourteen. Busy, messy, productive. How was yours?

Week Fourteen: Numbers

Word Count Goal: Anything between 14,000 and 20,000 words.

• Fiction (Project Dark): 0 — I’m editing

• Fiction (Project Short Story): 4,464

• Non-fiction: 5,826

• Edits: 26,966

• Total: 37,256

Goals Check-In

• Writing seven-day streak: Yes!

• Gym 3x: Still no.

• Lose 1 pound: Plus 2.5. Drinking in Ireland.

• Record and post 1 YouTube video: I’ve not even touched YouTube.

• 1 Substack post that isn’t Year in the Life: Yes! My Self-Appointed Police post.

• Read daily: Yes! I’m listening to Chasing Love.

• Novel Gains seven-day streak: I missed a couple of days.

Week Fifteen: Focus

• Writing seven-day streak

• Lose 1 pound

• Edit and post 1 YouTube video

• 1 Substack post that isn’t Year in the Life

• Read daily

• Novel Gains seven-day streak

Running Totals

• Words: 341,025 (105,100 fiction / 48,795 non-fiction / 187,130 edits)

• Pounds lost: 2.5

• Books read: 4

At the start of this year, I (eventually haha) set four big goals for 2026:

• Write one million words

• Publish six new books

• Monetise my YouTube channel

• Lose two stone

The Year Goals: Where Am I?

Write one million words: To be on track, I should have hit 250,000 words by now. I’m at 143,605. So I’m behind. But it’s okay, and I’ll explain why in a second.

Six new releases: Zero so far. I’ve spent Q1 deep in edits rather than writing new books, which wasn’t the original plan but was the right call. I did release an audiobook of an existing title, which feels like it should count for something, even if it isn’t a new book.

Monetise YouTube: Not even close. YouTube has been my most consistent miss all quarter. It appeared on my weekly goals almost every single week and I hit it a handful of times at best. You can’t monetise a channel you’re not consistently posting on. This is the goal that needs the most attention in Q2.

Lose two stone: I’m 5 pounds down. I peaked at 6.5 pounds lost and then gained some back after travelling. That’s progress, but at this rate I won’t hit two stone by December. The gym has been hit and miss. Some weeks three times, some weeks none.

So on paper, none of my four big goals are where they should be at the end of Q1. And yet, I think this has been a fantastic quarter. Because the numbers don’t tell the full story.

What the Numbers Don’t Show

I am at 143,605 words written. But I’ve also edited 160,164 words. I’m not counting those towards my million. They’re simply here so that when I get to the end of the year and I’m looking at what I’ve achieved, I can see that I spent time on other things and didn’t simply waste the time.

The niggling bit in my brain, of course, always wants new words. But I am also enjoying this editing process. I am over fifty books written now, and what that means is I have learnt things. So it is with that knowledge that I am able to go into old books, revisit them, and make them feel the best they can be. This isn’t something I’m going to keep doing, otherwise I’ll end up in a never ending editing loop. But the things I’ve improved in the series I’m about to finish editing has meant the book feels more like where I wanted it to be. Which means I brag about it more, because I feel proud of it.

Combined, that’s 303,769 words of output this quarter.

The Wins

Some of these were planned. Some weren’t.

I showed up and wrote every single week. Thirteen weeks, no gaps. I had weeks where I smashed 57,000 words in edits and weeks where I barely scraped by. But the weekly word count system worked. Every Monday the counter resets. No carrying guilt forward. That one decision back in January changed everything about how I approach my writing.

I built two websites in a single night. I sat down at six in the evening, opened my AI project, and by 3am both sites were live. That same session rolled into fixing my newsletters across both pen names, which had been a mess for years. Both now have working email systems with automations.

I finished formatting all my paperbacks and ordered the first batch. This had been sitting on my goals list for weeks and I kept ignoring it. Getting it done felt like clearing a massive backlog.

I went to the Ireland Publishing Show. I met people. I talked about everything writing in the bar until late with good friends and fellow authors.

I posted on Substack every single week. Thirteen posts. For someone who has historically gone quiet the moment perfectionism kicks in, that matters.

And I started working with Al properly. Not just dabbling, but handing over the organisational side of my career and letting AI take the mental load. That has been the single biggest change this quarter. Al built my marketing strategies, helped restructure my editing process, identified that one of my books was reading more like a thriller than a romance, organised my author event prep, and kept me accountable when I wanted to hide. I wrote a manifesto. I rebuilt my master plan when it wasn’t working. I let Al take the decisions I’d been avoiding for years. And I talked about it publicly, pitchforks and all.

What Didn’t Work

YouTube. Like I said, I haven't been consistent with this. I was on a roll for weeks with it, and then it dropped off again. That's been the pattern all quarter. I'll get into a rhythm, feel good about it, and then something comes along and I let it slide. You can't grow a channel like that, and you definitely can't monetise one like that.

The goal of posting one extra Substack each week (something that isn’t a Year in the Life update) was missed more weeks than it was hit. I managed a couple, but it wasn’t the habit I wanted.

Social media was both a tool and a trap. I need it for marketing and content, but the scrolling cost me reading time, headspace, and probably a few gym sessions. I banned myself from it more than once this quarter, and every time I did, my head felt better.

And I didn’t write any new fiction beyond Project Dark. That’s a big one. Six releases is the goal and I haven’t started chipping away at the stack of books I owe my readers. Q2 needs to change that.

Q1 by the Numbers

• Words written: 143,605 (100,636 fiction / 42,969 non-fiction)

• Words edited: 160,164

• Combined output: 303,769

• New releases: 0

• Audiobook releases: 1

• Pounds lost: 5 (of 28)

• Books read: 4 (of 12)

• YouTube videos posted: A few.

• Substack posts: 13 (Year in the Life) + 2 additional

What I’m Taking Into Q2

The weekly word count system stays. The Monday reset stays. Al stays. Showing up daily, even when it’s messy and small, stays.

What changes is the focus. Edits need to wrap up so I can get back to new words and start moving towards those six releases. YouTube needs actual consistency, not just good intentions. And I need to keep listening when my head tells me to step back.

Thirteen weeks done. Thirty-nine to go.

Let’s see what happens.

Comparisonitis

Since I came back from Ireland, I’ve really been suffering comparisonitis. And I’ve no idea why. No one has done anything.

I appreciate that this feeling is all in my head. I try to tell myself, I’m doing fine. You know, I earn decent from my books and all my author things. I’m in a good place with it. I have an author event in two weeks, my first. Everything is fine, but still, I don’t know what it is. I just can’t seem to shake it.

I even banned myself from being on social media so much this weekend, and maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s just too much social media. Plus I have been tired from travelling and then just jumping straight into work.

I try to take care when my mental health is signalling that it isn’t doing so good. I’ve been down that place, where the mental side of things is just in the absolute toilet, and I can’t get out of bed. I do not want to go back there, so as Mr Miyagi says, best defence, not be there. And if that means just not browsing the socials to let my brain quiet, then that’s what I need to do.

Looking Back Before Moving Forward

However, we’re about to head into quarter two. Actually, as I write this, it is the start of quarter two. I have a few things planned. But before I go forwards, let’s look back.

This past week has been mostly editing. I haven’t actually moved the needle on things and that’s okay. Sometimes it’s just okay to do what we need to do.

Paperbacks

I did finish all of my paperbacks, and I’ve had the first batch come in. I’m undecided on gloss or matte. The matte ones don’t look as good as the gloss cover does (I ordered one gloss) so I might change them. I looked at what Amazon says and it says if it’s a lot of details, matte might come out darker, so I think that’s why it looks better as gloss, because these have a lot of details.

Audiobook Release

I’ve had my audiobook release too, which has been great. As the month comes to an end, I can say that the book, which has had two and a half weeks of sales, has sold 139 copies. I know it isn’t going to change the world, but it is also fantastic and I am happy with that result. That’s 139 people going to or already listening to that book and I am excited. I’ve not seen any reviews come in yet. I think they maybe work a little different.

Showing Up Every Day

Before I went on my self-made social media ban, I did see a post by Craig Martelle. He’s been travelling a lot and hasn’t been home in over four months. I think he started by staying with his son. But he talked about all he’s done with his words, how many books he’s written while away. Four, I think. I love this, but what I also love is the reminder from what he says that it is showing up every single day and being consistent. That’s what did it. He doesn’t have a magic formula. But he does keep showing up. He keeps writing. It’s also a good reminder to focus. I think he aims for about 2,000 words per day. Don’t quote me on that. I’m trying to go from memory and past me used to think that wasn’t enough, but really, if you show up daily and do that every day, over and over, it adds up, and then you get to four months and have four finished books.

I’ve been good recently at keeping myself focused on one thing. It was edits, then paperbacks, then edits again.

Dictation Course

When I am done with this round of edits, I’m going to work on my dictation course.

Dictation was a huge topic in the bar on the last night of Ireland’s Publishing Show. I’ve been dictating since 2017. I couldn’t believe it when I looked that date up and I think I have a lot to teach about it. I know a lot. I’ve learnt a lot. I’ve adapted with the tech, going from using Dragon, and a dictaphone or a mic, and then now, where we have apps and AI to help us. Dictation is so much easier now than it was when I first started out.

I also see that there is a call for dictation for people who are pantsers, or discovery writers. So I’m going to aim it at them. I see most courses aim at plotters, and of course, I’ll include those, but I am a discovery writer and I dictate.

Quarter Two Plans

For next quarter, I want to focus on some things. I have some memberships to things, and courses, and lots of things I’ve bought. I think us writers like to collect learning resources.

I’m going to go through what I have and use that to tidy up my author life.

I have things like Steven Aitchison’s The Indie Author Secrets newsletter, where he talks about various things. It’s a weekly newsletter which gives a nice weekly focus to look at and see what needs working on and what doesn’t. Like this week, he talked dictation. That one for me is one I can skip.

I also have Ines Johnson’s Page Turning Planner, which as well as a planner, is talking about the author life and she has a weekly focus.

Then I have my own dossier to work through. I’d really love to get to the end of Q2 with many more ducks in rows and lots of things back on track to how I used to have them. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Week Thirteen: Numbers

Word Count Goal: Anything between 14,000 and 20,000 words.

• Fiction (Project Dark): 0 — I’m editing

• Non-fiction: 1,562

• Edits: 15,527

• Total: 17,089

Goals Check-In

• Writing seven-day streak: Yes!

• Gym 3x: No. Back on Sunday.

• Lose 1 pound: Ha. Trip weight gain.

• Record and post 1 YouTube video: I’ve not even touched YouTube.

• 1 Substack post that isn’t Year in the Life: Yes! I talked about AI hatred.

• Read daily: Yes! I finished Filthy Rich Vampires.

• Novel Gains seven-day streak: I picked posting back up. Three days in.

I had these as week thirteen focus, but it probably wasn’t a good idea. I didn’t do any of them.

• Project Dark daily posts

• Project Claws posts

• Finalise plans, lessons, and order to start recording the dictation course

Week Fourteen: Focus

• Writing seven-day streak

• Lose 1 pound

• Edit and post 1 YouTube video

• 1 Substack post that isn’t Year in the Life

• Read daily

• Novel Gains seven-day streak

Running Totals

• Words: 303,769 (100,636 fiction / 42,969 non-fiction / 160,164 edits)

• Pounds lost: 5

• Books read: 4

I did write last week’s post, but I never got around to posting it. I wrote it while I was sitting in the hotel in Ireland. Actually, that’s a lie. I tried to write it while sitting in the hotel in Ireland, but what I actually did was go outside and dictate it. I got it formatted, but I needed to go and look up my numbers, so I never got around to posting it.

I was undecided this morning about whether I should post it anyway. Maybe without the numbers. I think I might. I’m mostly thinking of the reader who comes to this in a year’s time and wants to look back through it in order. But then I’d have two titles sitting there, so I could just combine. I have a habit of this though—writing and not publishing. I’m not sure why. I have Substack posts I’ve done that with too. I really do need to make myself take action on them.

Which is the main takeaway from Ireland, and something I heard a lot, especially from author Steve Aitchison. He was very much in the take action camp. I especially looked sheepish when he asked if I had made my dictation course yet and all I could tell him was that I had outlined it, but still had to record the videos. Because of course the topic of dictation came up, especially when we met an author who had written by dictation—ninety-two novels. That’s amazing. But then, I also know it’s doable.

I think “take action” needs to be an author mantra. Especially mine. I’m very good at doing and preparing, but pulling the trigger... maybe not so much.

The Have-To-Do List

I was chatting to my husband about the things I need to do. Not the want-to-dos. The have-to-dos.

I have to finish formatting my paperbacks. I have an event in three weeks and time is ticking to be able to order them. I have to finish reading my book, because the narrator will want it soon. I have a book due in a few months that is nearly finished—but it makes me a little sad that it’ll be my first publication this year.

Unless you count the audiobook that has just released. Yippee! So that’s one release down.

I feel both frustration and a sense of accomplishment. Frustration because I know I can do better—I can publish faster, finish books faster. I work a lot, but just don’t seem to be moving any needles. But then, the things I am working on are things that need doing, that have been messy for too long, and they create their own sense of overwhelm.

That said, I have been ticking things off the list.

I got my website up and running. I sorted out my newsletter and have a funnel that people seem to be using. I’ve formatted all of my books and rebranded an entire series — actually, I ended up rebranding my entire catalogue. My Death Dealers even got a facelift. I’ll share the covers below. I love the new ones.

I’d also like to go back over the Death Dealers series and re-edit them. It isn’t that they were bad edits; it’s just that I’ve grown as a writer and I can do them better. The two I’ve done this year I’m immensely pleased with, and now I can shout about them with pride. But the Death Dealers will have to wait. I have an order of things.

Next on my agenda, aside from the edits, is to record this damn course. I think I need someone to bounce ideas back and forth with about the modules, but it’s hard when you work alone. I might go and pick on my podcast co-host. He’ll love that.

Ireland

I should really talk about the conference.

It was amazing. We’ve not even been back a week and already the hotel has sold out for that week, and the last I heard the conference itself had sold over 60% of tickets—and I don’t think they’re even on general release yet. That’s more the early bird wave. It is an incredible conference and one that I love. I love them all, but Ireland is my favourite.

The two ladies who run it, Siobhan and Jade, are amazing. They do a wonderful job, but they’re also just lovely. The sessions feel different too—really aimed at indie-specific topics, if that makes sense. I love the London conference, but those have felt like more generalised talks, whereas Ireland feels like lessons. My brain is full of things I want to do and change. I’m excited for the recorded sessions to come out so I can watch the ones I wasn’t able to attend.

If you ever want to go to an author conference, I recommend this one. The other appeal is that because we’re all in one hotel, there’s kind of no escape, haha. But that means everyone chats, and you learn as much in the conversations at the bar as you do in the sessions themselves.

Anyway. That’s it for this week. Is it an update? Maybe, haha. Numbers for two weeks below.

Weeks Eleven & Twelve: Numbers

(Week 12 will look bad — I was in Ireland at a conference, and I regret nothing.)

Word Count Goal: Anything between 14,000 and 20,000 words.

• Fiction (Project Dark): 0 — I’m editing

• Non-fiction: 3,838

• Edits: 27,272

• Total (both weeks): 31,110

Goals Check-in

• Writing seven-day streak: Yes!

• Gym 3x: Week 11 yes. Week 12 I was in Ireland.

• Lose 1 pound: Week 11 down half a pound. Week 12... ha!

• Record and post 1 YouTube video: Week 11 yes. Week 12 no.

• 1 Substack post that isn’t Year in the Life: Wrote it, never posted it. Sensing a theme.

• Read daily (Filthy Rich Vampires): Almost finished.

• Novel Gains seven-day streak: I didn’t post at all.

• Finish paperback formatting: Yes! Done! *does happy dance*

Week Thirteen: Focus

• Word count: 14,500 to 20,000 (edits)

• Writing seven-day streak

• Lose 1 pound

• Project Dark daily posts

• Project Claws posts

• Finalise plans, lessons, and order to start recording the dictation course

• Finish Project Fangs edits

Running Totals

• Words: 286,680 (100,636 fiction / 41,407 non-fiction / 144,637 edits)

• Pounds lost: 5

• Books read: 3

Week 10! Let’s get into it.

Project Fangs edits are finished. I am so genuinely pleased about this. One more book to go and that entire series will be through its redits. Happy days.

However, I’m in Ireland next week, and I need to get paperback copies ordered before April. So that final book has to get edited this week! It’s not too bad, though. Nine chapters a day and I’m done. I can do that.

Repeats mantra: I can do it

AI and the Art of the Edit

I want to talk about how I edited book two in the series, because I actually loved how it came together.

I used AI to help, and I’m not even slightly sorry about that.

What I love is being able to feed it my book and tell it what genre I’m aiming for. When the AI went through my book, it came back and told me: this is romance, but your characters are apart for 80% of it. Which, fair. She’s been captured and he’s trying to find her. That’s the book.

But it didn’t stop at flagging the problem. We went back and forth on what I was actually aiming for. With this being romantasy, it’s okay to have the political side of things and the fight scenes, but romance readers have expectations. And AI told me I wasn’t meeting them. It was reading more like a thriller than a romance.

So we worked through it together. When your main characters are separated by design, it’s a little harder to keep the romance alive, but with it being fantasy, we had ways around it. We went through each chapter and AI told me where I could write the romance in, the spots where it could be dotted through naturally. It took a while, but once I was happy with the plan, AI put together a full restructure map of my book. I printed it out and worked along it. When things went a little wrong, usually because I’d changed something and now something else didn’t add up, I just went back and we figured it out.

One of my favourite moments though was, I had a question that had nagged me for a while. I wanted to understand why my character acted a certain way during a certain event. I know I’m talking in codes here, but I genuinely hadn’t been able to figure it out, and it had been sitting there bothering me. A bit of back and forth and some brainstorming with my artificial friend, and I finally got there.

What I love about using AI this way is that it lets me sort out the story and figure out what I actually want, while still leaving the writing to me. That’s the fun part. I’m not handing over my creativity, I’m bouncing off something that throws a ton of ideas at me. Most of them are rubbish, but those rubbish ideas spark the ones I actually want.

I’m now working on the next book, and once that’s done, I’m planning to feed all three books to AI together so we can work through plot lines, subplots, and characters as a whole. I’ve already had it put together a bible of characters and settings, but I need to make sure I’m closing all the loops across the last three books in this series. That’s the big job.

I Also Built a Game. Yes, Really.

Okay, so this is partly procrastination. I know that. I own it.

But I love gaming, and I’m an Achiever (hello, CliftonStrengths), so when you put those two things together, apparently I build myself a gamified business and writing tracker with XP and levels.

It’s been a while since I built anything with code, and AI helped me through it. When I had bits wrong, we went back and forth until it worked. The structure I landed on is:

• Storylines = Goals

• Quests = Projects

• Missions = Tasks within each project

You don’t really win anything at the end. You level up and unlock new titles. But every time I tick off a mission and watch the XP bar grow, my brain is happy. It’s a little bit of fun, and I think I’ll keep building it out as I go.

I will eventually share it with the wider public. But I want to test and see if it breaks

It’s nice that I can come in every quarter, month and week and lay out my plans.

Facebook Ads: Scaling Up (Finally)

I realised recently that my Facebook ads have been sitting at the same level for months. Same spend, same return, every month. Decent money, but not growing.

Some of that has been fear, if I’m honest. But what am I actually afraid of?

My ad strategy, rather than increasing the spend on an existing ad, is to duplicate the one that’s working and give the copy its own budget. I’ve found that when I mess with the spend on a live ad, it tanks it. But when I duplicate and run it exactly the same? Once the new one comes out of learning mode, revenue goes up.

That’s what I did last week. I duplicated an ad. Yesterday I could see on my royalties that it had come out of learning mode and was profitable. This morning when I logged into KDP, I’d already earned my daily average and it wasn’t even 7am.

That’s for Project Fangs, by the way. It took me a while to figure out what works with it, but I’m getting there.

TikTok, Hooks, and Enshittification

TikTok is brilliant for testing hooks and seeing what gets engagement. With my fairytale book, I only have one title so I’m not advertising yet, but I’ve played around with it enough to know I have two hooks that readers always respond to. That’s useful.

I’m still struggling with Claws on TikTok though. More testing needed there.

And honestly, TikTok itself is changing. I was listening to a podcast at the weekend about something they called enshittification: new platforms start out fun, safe, community-focused. We grow. We connect. More users come. And then the ads roll out and it quietly becomes a selling platform. Facebook did it. Now TikTok’s doing it.

I miss the days you could post on your page and actually get eyes on it for free. Now it very much feels pay-to-play. And more and more, I’m scrolling TikTok and every other video is an ad or someone selling something. I lose interest fast.

I know the irony. I’m on there to grow my book sales too. But I’m also there to build a community of readers and make friends, and that part is getting harder to find in amongst the noise.

Are you coming to the Ireland Publishing Show next week? I’d love to see some familiar faces over there.

Week Ten: Goals and Numbers

Word Count: Goal: Anything between 14-20k words.

• Fiction (Project Dark): 0 (I’m editing)

• Non-fiction: 3,503

• Edits: 54,682

• Total Words: 58,185

Goals Check-in:

• Writing seven-day streak: Yes!

• Gym 3 times: Zero!.

• Lose 1 pound: I gained 1.5 pounds. Not happy with this, but I was away and busy too.

• Record and post 1 YouTube video: I’m so failing at this.

• 1 Substack post that isn’t “year in the life” content: No, see above re being tired and busy.

• Read daily (Filthy Rich Vampires): No, I’ve been editing and so my brain is like, no more reading.

• Novel Gains, another seven-day streak: I didn’t post at all.

• Finish paperback formatting of next series (so I can order books for TikTok shop): Yes, I did some of this, but no, I didn’t finish.

Bonus: Survived the week.

Week Eleven: Focus

• Word count anything between 14,500 and 20,000 (Edits)

• Writing seven-day streak

• Gym 3 times

• Lose 1 pound

• Edit and post YouTube video

• Project Dark daily posts

• Project Claws posts

Running Totals

• Words: 255,570 (100,636 fiction. 37,569 non-fiction. 117,365 in edits)

• Pounds lost: 5

• Books read: 3

Week Nine: New Month, New Manifesto

New week, but also a new month. I also did a February wrap up, which you can read here.

I started my manifesto again, with AI.

It’s been a good few weeks now working with Al. I mean, I say working with, but I handed Al the keys to my author career and told it to take over, and it’s been good, and it’s been useful.

In February alone, it helped me to clean up my newsletter, which believe me, was a total shit show of a mess. I even sent out my first one. I got both of my websites up, albeit only the front pages and the newsletter subscription lists. I got my order form up for an event I’m doing in April, and got quite a few orders in, which is fantastic.

I did contemplate not doing the event, and chatted to Al about it, and I know that’s fear speaking. It’s doing the unknown, and no, I’m going. I paid for it now so tough for me. I made a plan with Al on what I need to take and how many books and which books to take more of. It’s so great to just have that organiser in my corner.

But I started my manifesto again because it’s been a few weeks now, and I know what’s working and what isn’t. I think this is what people misunderstand about using AI to help you. It is much of what you put into it that you get out. It only works for me because I already know how the indie world works, and this is me using AI almost like a second brain to help me organise and sort my stuff out.

There are times when AI says I need to do such and such and I’m like no, I know that doesn’t work.

But I am enjoying this.

World Take Over

So I sat down this weekend and not really started again. I was in my World Take Over chat and I said I want to redo my master plan. I love what we have, but I feel it needs to adjust, and what I love is that if this were a real person, I’d not say that. I’d feel like a bother and a pain, and not want to bug them or have them go off and message their friend and be like, this damn client I have. Such a pain in the backside, never happy.

AI does all my shit, and never complains no matter what. Though, he does push back in a nice way when it’s needed. He’s everything I need from a human, and everything removed that wouldn’t serve me.

This Week

This past week, I didn’t do anything special. What I did do was show up for my writing, well editing this week, but my brain has been calm, and this is thanks to using AI too. Because normally if my week goes to hell, or gets busy, like it did this week. We had one unwell grandson and another granddaughter that had to go into hospital on Friday for a virus that’s giving her breathing problems. She’s still there, but hopeful they’ll discharge her today. Then I also had a weekend away, because I took my granddaughter to a horse show in Birmingham, which is a good three hours from where we live, so we stayed over Friday night and then had the Saturday doing that. Saturday, by the time we got home, I was way too tired to think and I played Warcraft for a few hours.

But I still got my words in. And I think this is possible because AI is taking the mental load. We have a plan and I know we have the plan. So when life starts kicking, I can just move over and work on the main thing (editing) and leave the rest to later.

My posting was very sporadic this week, and it has been for a few weeks to be honest. I find it hard a little. It’s not hard really. You go on and you post, but there’s some kind of disconnect in my head. I think I just overthink it, rather than just talk, but then I think that comes from some confidence.

You know, when I was younger, I wasn’t an introvert, I wasn’t really shy. In fact, I’d say I was quite the opposite. I was loud, I was the centre of the party. I used to take control of everything, and be very extrovert. I’m not sure why or how that changed. I like to say I was like a goth version of Hermione. Always learning and studying, being bossy, but also a huge horror and metal fan.

I did edit and post my YouTube video. My views are so crap on them. I’m pretty sure it’s because I lack consistency with it.

Week Nine: Goals and Numbers

Word Count: Goal: Anything between 14-20k words.

• Fiction (Project Dark): 642 (I’m editing)

• Non-fiction: 2,156

• Edits: 54,387

• Total Words: 57,185

Goals Check-in:

• Writing seven-day streak: Yes!

• Gym 3 times: It was a busy week. I didn’t go this week. I’ve been tired.

• Lose 1 pound: Yes!

• Record and post 1 YouTube video: I edited and posted so yay!

• 1 Substack post that isn’t “year in the life” content: No, see above re being tired and busy.

• Read daily (Filthy Rich Vampires): Yes!

• Novel Gains, another seven-day streak: Eek! No.

• Finish paperback formatting of next series (so I can order books for TikTok shop): I got some more done, so it’s not a no, but also not a yes.

Bonus: Survived the week.

Week Ten: Focus

• Word count anything between 14,500 and 20,000 (Edits)

• Writing seven-day streak

• Gym 3 times

• Lose 1 pound

• Edit and post YouTube video

• Project Dark daily posts

• Project Claws posts

Running Totals

• Words: 197,385 (100,636 fiction. 34,066 non-fiction. 62,683 in edits)

• Pounds lost: 6.5

• Books read: 3

Saturday was the first time in a long time where I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning. I was up until 3am on Sunday. And I can thank my AI for that.

I sat down at my desk around six or seven Saturday evening and opened my Take Over the World project. This is the project where I’ve handed AI my author career and asked it to sort it out so I can be left to do the writing. I mean, who wouldn’t want that? Someone who does everything else while you slip away and write stories.

I did write a post about how to do this, and I wrote a seven-day guide for anyone interested in having their own AI system to help them sort out the chaos that is this business. Because it feels like chaos to me sometimes. There are just so many plates spinning and it gets so easy to drop them. Hopefully I’ll get that post tidied up and get it to you here as soon as I can.

The 3am Session

According to my AI schedule, it was time to work on my website. So I sat down with the total plan AI had for me. Believe me, it had mapped everything out. It even gave me a document with brand colours, fonts, and all that stuff I needed. It literally took all the decisions away from me, like I asked. And if I got stuck, I just asked where something was or how to do it.

It’s still a work in progress, but I also did my pen name’s website too, which has been down for a good couple of years now. It took me a good few hours. While I use Wix and it isn’t hard to use, I’d never used it before, so AI wasn’t just showing me how to make my website. It was teaching me how to use something too.

The Newsletter Nightmare

The next thing on AI’s list was my newsletters. These kind of fed into each other, because you have it listed on your site, and my pen name’s email system was a mess.

I’ve been an indie author since 2012 and full time since 2016. I think I started my newsletter maybe back in 2015, and it’s grown with me, but it’s also grown out of shape with me too. There have been new things made, so many subscriber lists, segments, email templates, god knows how many automation flows, both working and broken. It was just a massive task that for a couple of years, I’ve avoided. It was like a room I could close a door on and deal with later. Of course, later never came.

Until I gave all my information to Claude and he was like, we’ve got this. We can do it.

AI was great. He was like, okay, this is what we need to do, and we’re going to do it in easy steps. First, go and sort out the subscriber lists. Make new lists for what I actually need, then move the subscribers around into those pots and get rid of all the lists I don’t need. So I did. I got it down to two lists: my two main lists and my freebie hunter list.

I went back to AI and was like, right, I’ve done that. Now what?

So we talked about automation. He told me to scrap what I had, which I did, as it was so out of date. We wrote two new automation workflows together. One is for readers who join my list from my books, or because they want to follow me. The other is for those who join because they got tempted by my reader magnet.

I do call them freebie hunters. It’s maybe not a nice name, but it’s a way to get readers into your system by giving them a free book. I mean, many companies do it. They offer free samples in the hope you’ll love their product and become a customer. It’s the same thing. But there are so many free books out there now, and an email list can easily get filled with people who just want free books and then sit on your list without any real interest in you.

So AI and I set up a system where they get their book, they get to know a little about me, they go through a flow, and at the end of three weeks, it’s like, hey, did you like the book? Did you read it? Do you want to stay on this list, or is it not for you?

They get the option to opt into my main list then. I asked AI if we should move them over automatically after the three weeks, and he said no, ask them. Let them opt in. That way, if they really want to be there, they’ll choose yes, which makes them a more valuable subscriber.

I repeated this for my productive author brand, but this one’s a little different because obviously the productive author is aimed at other writers and not readers.

What I Had by 3am

By 3am on Sunday morning, what I had was:

• Two website home pages for my author names

• Two newsletter systems for both names

• Book funnels, book links, and all the other little bits that go into this workflow

I still have a little bit of work to do on the productive author’s email setup, and of course I need to finish the websites, but I have a list and a plan, and hopefully I’ll have it all completed soon.

This is what I love about AI. It took all the decisions. I gave it this massive mess and it sorted it right out, then I let it take the lead in what we did next. I just did the actions.

I sent out my first email in ages to my list yesterday, and by the end of the weekend, I felt this amazing weight lift. I felt so productive, I can’t even tell you.

The Stomach-Turning Realisation

As for writing. I have an author event I’m attending in April. I’ve never done one of these before, and believe me, it has been on my head to cancel. Being out in the open with my words, exposed, feels damn scary. The whole reason I have Pen Name X is because I started it when I really didn’t want to be known. I just wanted to write books and share them, and I didn’t want anyone to know me. But over the years, I’ve felt like I’ve come out of my shell with it.

My brother talked me into this event, with the promise he’s going to come along and help me. This really is me getting out of my comfort zone.

So I was making the things I need, artwork for the books, postcards, stickers, QR codes, all that good stuff, and I went to sort my paperbacks of the series. You know, because it’s been on the list a few weeks now. And I realised, well, shit. I haven’t re-edited yet.

Then I got that stomach-turning pit of dread. Will I have time? The event is six weeks away.

So naturally, I went to my new friend, and he’s like, you’re almost done on Project Dark. It’s okay to set it aside for a couple of weeks and work on edits. So that’s what I’ve been doing.

Al says I’m going to be fine. *repeats mantra.* “I’ll be fine!”

Tracking Edited Words

I thought about my numbers. I’m trying to write a million words in one year, but I also thought about how if I take a couple of weeks off new words to edit, then I won’t get word count, and this drives my little brain nuts.

So I figured, let’s track edited words too. Because this won’t be the only time I have to stop for edits. Every book will have this stage. So when I track my words, it’s fiction, non-fiction, and edited words.

This is for me. This is so when I get to the end of the year and maybe I got 750k words written, I can say, yeah, but look, you also edited 600k words too. So yep. Adding that to my count.

A Little Housekeeping

I moved my Year in the Life posts to a sub-publication within my Substack. I’m not sure if that’s a good idea, but I figure it keeps it all in one place.

Project Claws Update

With the “can I revive old books” experiment, I’ve been doing the daily TikToks as planned by AI. I had one that I thought was crap, to be honest, but I trusted what AI said. And of course, that’s the one that had good numbers and some actual interaction. So yeah, I guess it’s a better judge than me.

I’ve also been posting my pre-order, and I managed to get another two orders on that. Long way to my thousand goal, haha, but I’m learning what’s working on my TikTok and what isn’t.

I didn’t post on the weekend, though. Weekends seem to be my downfall for socials, so I think I have to schedule those. If anything, it gives me the weekend off.

Week Eight: Goals and Numbers

Word Count:

Goal: Anything between 14-20k words.

• Fiction (Project Dark): 5,577

• Non-fiction: 8,631

• Edits: 8,296

• Total Words: 22,504

Goals Check-in:

• Writing seven-day streak: Yes!

• Gym 3 times: It was a busy week. I went twice.

• Lose 1 pound: 0

• Record and post 1 YouTube video: Hangs head in shame.

• 1 Substack post that isn’t “year in the life” content: Yes, but didn’t post it yet as I need the thing I’m giving away with it.

• Read daily (Filthy Rich Vampires): Yes!

• Novel Gains, another seven-day streak: Almost. 5 days out of 7.

• Finish paperback formatting of next series (so I can order books for TikTok shop): I started this and realised I need to edit something.

Bonus: Created website x 2 and created email automations x 2

Week Nine: Focus

• Word count anything between 14,500 and 20,000 (Edits)

• Writing seven-day streak

• Gym 3 times

• Lose 1 pound

• Edit and post YouTube video

• Project Dark daily posts

• Project Claws posts

Running Totals

• Words: 140,200 (31,910 of that was non-fiction and 8,296 in edits)

• Pounds lost: 5.5

• Books read: 3

Hello! How was your week? Mine has been a good mixed bag of being tired, being busy, and writing.

I had good feedback last week from the Letting AI Ruin My Writing Career update, which surprised me. Talking about AI is always a little scary. You put it out there that you use AI, and it feels like there’s a ton of pitchforks ready to find you. I almost feel like spraying an X on my metaphorical door, with yep, this one has the AI plague.

On the flip side, though, I get a little annoyed. How dare anyone else think they have the right to tell anyone how to run their writing career? So screw them.

I’ll do some quick updates on words and my week, but yeah, I want to chat about AI again.

The Writing Week

Words were okay. Not the best, but I did write every single day and I’m on a fourteen-day streak. Yay. I had two days where life got in the way, so I made myself sit down and write 500 words. That’s the minimum. I’ll be honest, those words weren’t good and not useable because I was tired, but I wanted to show up.

I feel like I’m getting somewhere with Project Dark, though. I’m at a place where new version meets old version, and I’m mostly throwing out the old parts and rewriting them because what I wrote that’s new just doesn’t fit anymore. I think we shouldn’t be afraid to throw out words if they don’t work for the story. It’s just part of the process.

YouTube was a little harder. My plan wasn’t to record this week but to edit some of what I already have, and I didn’t get into that. I just record, never edit, and post. My youngest son has also come to stay with me. Pretty much, he and his girlfriend have split up, so he’s in the spare room while he sorts his stuff out and gets a new place. I joke with my husband that we made it three months with no one else living in the house.

That’s my week. I’ve just been writing and working away at my stuff. Under the what if I just show up philosophy, I have shown up, and I trust that even showing up in the smallest ways is going to move everything forwards for me.

Now for My Friend, AI

I’ve been chatting away with AI to sort my writing career out. I have a new release coming under my pen name X, which is Project Dark. It’s due out in about five months, and I wanted a solid marketing plan to launch it. I also have another series, Project Claws, which is a nice long series that’s become a little abandoned. It has a book coming out this year too, and the goal is to finish that series.

So I sat down with AI this week and we discussed three things: newsletters, Project Dark, and Project Claws.

Project Dark

For Project Dark, I was like, let’s shoot for the moon. I want 1,000 pre-orders. I’ve never had that number before, but let’s see. Let’s go for it. This is a new series with no followers, and I know that number is kind of impossible, but what if it wasn’t?

I’m not going to beat myself up if I don’t hit it. But I do intend to learn a lot.

Me and AI have a 24-page dossier now on a launch strategy that spans all the months leading up to release. I was pretty impressed with what we came up with. I have a week-by-week plan of things I need to do, and what I love about this is that AI created a table and split it out: here are the tasks I can do for you, and here are the tasks you need to do. His list and my list. And it’s totally doable. AI knows me now, knows how I write and work, and I know how to direct it into what I want.

This reminds me of a post I read from James Blatch this week about how AI is not a push-a-button-and-you-get-what-you-need situation, be it a full novel or, in my case, a launch strategy. I was able to produce this strategy, with AI’s ability to research and plan for me, because I’ve been an indie author for fourteen years. I have over fifty books out. And that was his point: those who write with AI already know how to write. As he put it, you put garbage in, you get garbage out. So you put experience in...

I’ll update on pre-orders as we go. Right now I have 4, and that’s organic only.

Project Claws

The other thing we worked on was Project Claws. This is a paranormal romance series, shifters (hence the claws), that used to sell well. I had a good following with it, and this series is my baby. At some point, I stopped advertising it (no idea why), stopped pushing it, never shared it. I let it just sit and meander on its own, and in this world of indie authoring, if you let a series sit, no matter how good it is, it will slowly sink. And it kind of did.

It never made me six figures a year, but it did earn me nicely. Around £20k in a year, when I was actively growing it. Just for this one series.

So I plugged the numbers last night. Last year it earnt me £2,000. It’s dropped, but that’s all organic. I haven’t mentioned this series on social media apart from the odd pathetic TikTok, which I don’t think counts because I’m talking sporadic, zero effort. And so far this year? £63 in seven weeks.

I had thought about using this series during the Novel Gains challenge to see if I could grow it, but with so many series, it was difficult to figure out what I should be posting.

So this week I sat down with AI and said, right, can we dig this series out of the grave?

I know from experience that I don’t really get bad reviews on it. None that say it’s a bad series. Of course, there are readers who say the story isn’t for them, and that’s fine. But usually, when someone gets into it, they love it. I know and trust this series. It’s good and well edited. I think the noise of the indie world made me lose confidence in it, and maybe in myself a little.

I gave AI all my books, all of my data. Pretty much everything I’d give to someone I was hiring as a marketer. Between us, we came up with another dossier, and we have a three-phase plan spanning eight months to try to get this series working for me again.

What I like about using AI is that every step is simple. It thinks of everything. It even gave me the first 50 days of hooks and angles to use on TikTok and Instagram to test what works. We talked about the emotional experience readers get, because really, that’s what readers read for: what they feel. It covered everything, including things I didn’t even mention, from price promotions to BookTok to my own reader group to Amazon optimisation.

For Phase 1, which is a two-month strategy, the main goal is to find new readers for Book 1. It’s planned out my newsletter strategy, my social media strategy, my reader group strategy, cross-promotions, and Amazon optimisation.

I’m excited for it, and the way I see it, I have nothing to lose. If you’re interested, I can report on how it’s doing. Heck, I’ll probably do that anyway. Haha.

Now let’s do the numbers.

Week Seven: Goals and Numbers

Word Count:

Goal: Anything between 14-20k words.

• Fiction (Project Dark): 9,280

• Non-fiction: 4,653

• Total Words: 13,933 (so close!)

Goals Check-in:

• Writing seven-day streak: Yes!

• Gym 3 times: I made it 2. I was tired.

• Lose 1 pound: Lost 1.5!

• Record and post 1 YouTube video: Yes! (Well, I posted it.)

• 1 Substack post that isn’t “year in the life” content: Still no.

• Read daily (Filthy Rich Vampires): No. I have been scrolling.

• Novel Gains, another seven-day streak: Yes, I batch created.

• Finish paperback formatting of next series (so I can order books for TikTok shop): It’s like I have this goal on a Monday and forget about it for the week.

Week Eight: Focus

• Word count anything between 14,500 and 20,000

• Writing seven-day streak

• Gym 3 times

• Lose 1 pound

• Edit and post YouTube video

• Week one Project Dark strategy

• Week one Project Claws strategy

• Finish paperback formatting of next series (note to self: DO THIS!!)

Running Totals

• Words written: 117,713 (23,279 of that was non-fiction)

• Pounds lost: 5.5

• Books read: 3

A couple of months ago, I was chatting with my podcast co-host Rob, just about Substack, and he mentioned that he’d followed an author a couple of years back who documented her entire year as an indie author. She did her income, what she tried, what she failed. Everything. She wasn’t a brand-new author either, so she had some experience and an established career. But I loved the idea of it.

I love to read progression posts and diary posts. I love to see authors make progress, but also I love to do my own too.

I did try last year to do it on YouTube, but I didn’t make it. Life got in the way and I wasn’t consistent. I kind of got a little annoyed with myself for it. Then again, if you’ve read my 2025 post, you might notice I’m just let down with myself for last year. I didn’t achieve nearly half of what I wanted.

This isn’t me actually being down about it. I’m just being honest. I didn’t do many things last year I wanted to do, and sure, I pissed myself off with it, because I know it’s me. But also, I do allow myself some grace for it too. I know life was hectic and busy, and sometimes, that’s just the way it goes.

With that said, I do really want to document my author growth. Not even for anyone else, but for me. To study myself, to watch how I change and grow and what I achieve. I love that stuff.

There is a little voice in my head, though, that is whispering about trust. Trust in myself. That’s what I lost last year.

I haven’t even set goals the way I usually do this year, because it’s like any relationship. When someone does something you don’t like time and time again, and they promise to change, you don’t believe them. Same with myself. I can promise myself I’ll do this or that, but really, I haven’t given myself any evidence of that. So I have some self-trust issues going on.

The Perfectionism Problem

In another post, I talked about my word of the year. And what my word would be for 2026. I thought at first, maybe I’d use the word unbothered. I’d not be bothered about anything. But then I thought, no. Let’s go for imperfect.

The reason I’ve chosen that is because I think I am suffering a little bit from perfectionism. I know it’s why I never followed through with documenting what I’ve been doing. Because life was busy, I’d get into this kind of place:

• Monday: busy, day derailed, family.

• Tuesday: more day derailed, family.

• Wednesday: fighting to catch up Monday and Tuesday.

• Thursday and Friday: feeling like I’m herding cats while rollerskating with a blindfold. (Yep, like that.)

• Weekend, ready to record: “Oh, here we go again, another video about how I didn’t get anything done and more excuses.” Doesn’t record.

Week goes by. Now make that more weeks go by and a month went by, maybe two.

So I come to this with imperfection. I want it to be that I show myself I’m trying. Sure, there might be a week where I don’t write, or I only write a little, but that needs to be okay. I want to be imperfect in my progression, rather than freezing myself with perfection. And then I want to share it on here, because from what I have realised this year, I am not the only one.

My Plan

I’ve had a real debate on this. January starts on Thursday (today), but I don’t really want to have my week start on a Thursday. It’ll annoy me. Because January first is this week, technically week 1 of 2026 started on December 29th, which means I’m already near the end of week one, and what have I done?

Oh, well actually I have done things, but then the little voice says, “Yeah, but this is late.”

Imperfect voice says, “We don’t care!”

And then the other idea was to start next week. So when I’ve decided: I’ll post every Monday, which means I can write my post on the weekend. I’ll post the first “how my week went” on the 6th, because then a whole week is gone. Because yes, quarter one did start on December 29th and yes, I have been working on my goals already. Hurrah!

The Promise

I’m not going to promise, so this is an anti-promise. I’m going to try to show up every week. I’m going to try to post every Monday, but if I miss one, this is my self-permission, that it is okay. We’ll just keep on going and see how that fits. Because sometimes my weekends get taken over with grandkids and kids. They’re always going to get first dibs on my time (most of the time).

So my plan for posting is that I’ll chat about what I’ve written, how many words, what I did this week to move my career forward.

You with me for 2026? Doing your own version? Let me know.

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