What are your plans and goals for the next 90 days? Have you set a third quarter goal for this year?
In this post, I share with you my 90-day publishing plan to help you in your next project.
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Creating a 90-Day Goal
Planning what you have to do and working on it can actually give you clarity, peace of mind and a sense of direction.
Recently I had an Author Audience Academy member who was trying to figure out what to do, where to focus and I recommended she go through my Plan It Day training. She came out of there with so much more clarity, so much more strategy, and she is on fire!
“Thanks so much for your leading, help, and insight into the process of 90 day planning in Plan It Day. I probably would have skipped that module as a ‘been there, done that’ kind of thing unless you’d recommended I do it, since I mentioned to you that I was stuck. I mistakenly thought Plan It Day was on the order of a basic, general plan of the kind that you run into here and there. No such thing.
Plan It Day stirred me from the bottom up – in a very good way. Your sharing a couple of personal challenges also helped me really connect with you. Now I have greater courage and a detailed blueprint for the next 90 days! As well as insight into my motivations deeper than I think I could ever have gotten on my own.
I can’t thank you enough. Thank you, Shelley Hitz.”
– Azalea Dabill
So what are your goals for the next 90 days? Here are some tips that will help you lay out your goals and go through it, one step at a time.
In today’s training I’m going to give you a peek inside my planning for my upcoming book Broken Crayons Still Color.
Honestly, I have been overwhelmed. Therefore, I created a 90-day publishing plan.
In this post, I will give you a recap of the process that I went through and hope it helps you on your next project.
Step 1: Set Your Goal
The first thing you have to do is to think of what you want to accomplish within the next 90 days.
Maybe you want to focus on marketing and expanding your products. Or you may think of focusing on writing one book a month, for the next three months.
Whatever you want to accomplish, write it down as your main BREAKTHROUGH goal.
Every project is different. So you have to think of the factors that could affect your planning for the next 90 days.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself as you go through the planning.
*How big is your project?
Is it going to be a short Kindle book that you can finish in a week or is it a book that you have to accomplish in three months?
So you can be thinking of writing the kindle book this month, and marketing the next month.
*Do you have a team that work with you? Do you have the finances to hire people?
You have to think of the workload.
I have a team, so I have people working for me. I’m not going to do all the work myself. I have people who will work on formatting, setting up the web pages, lead pages and doing all the technical stuff.
But I don’t recommend starting with a project this big.
If this is your first book, stay simple.
If you’re doing it yourself, give yourself time. You can maybe do even just one book a quarter or one book every six months.
It just depends, and it’s trial and error for every person. You are the only person that knows what’s going to work best for you as you work out your plan.
*Do you have the time needed to devote to this project?
We’re all on a journey and it looks different for every single one of us, we all have a different calling.
God has not blessed me with children and that’s been a very difficult thing for me, but because of that I have a gift of time. So, I can do a lot more than someone who is a mom to three kids and working full-time.
So you have to determine these things in order to effectively set up the goal for the next 90 days.
Step 2: Do a Brain Dump
Next, I wrote everything out; what needs to be done, and everything else that is needed.
So that’s what I recommend you do. Simply take out your pen, paper, whiteboard, flip chart, mind mapping software, or anything that will work for you.
Then you will need to write down where you are at in the process right now, what you have done so far and the things that you still need to do.
For this particular project I ended up categorizing it. Blue is my first draft and it has to be done first. Then red is for my beta-readers group and the orange will be the launch. (Watch the video below to see the illustrations.)
Step 3: Set a date
You have to set a date on your big goal. You have to be realistic about the date that you set for your goal. If you think that you will not be able to start it soon based on the things that you have to do now, set it for a later date.
*Breakdown in Months
Then, break down your plan into months. I used colors, so blue is the first draft, orange is what I’m getting ready for my launch, and the red is the beta group. That’s the way I categorized it. You can do whatever you want and you can use whatever works for you.
Then, you take your list of tasks from your other page, and start taking things off of this list and putting it onto your plan.
The first list of tasks is not in any particular order as it was a brain dump of everything you still need to get done. So now it is time to take those things and organize it into an order that works for you.
*Breakdown in Weeks
Once you’ve assigned the tasks in the months where you want them accomplished, you then break them into weeks.
In Author Audience Academy we have a Motivation Monday post every week. On that post you write your weekly goals and I check in with you to see how you are progressing on your goals each week.
Be Flexible
When setting up your plan, you will need to be flexible and adaptable. You have to realize it may not always happen as you plan.
When I was creating my 90-day publishing plan, I realized I had to push it back a month because it was going to be too much and too stressful to try to finish in 3 months. I didn’t want to rush it.
It’s not a book to be rushed but I have to allow it to really come out in the way God wants it to come out.
Every book project is different. Therefore, you should always learn how to be flexible to these projects.
I have books I finished in a week like my short Kindle eBooks, but this is not one of those books.
I’d love to brainstorm it with you inside AuthorAudienceAcademy.com. I am available in our private Facebook group on a daily basis.
Success takes time and you just have to continue to make decisions. It’s not just about a big leap or getting out there and doing something big right now.
It’s about inching forward, taking the next step, and doing the next right thing, one small step at a time.
I hope this helped you and I would love nothing more than to see you cross your publishing finish line.
I’m excited to see what you do. Until next time!
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