How to set a goal

Many writers end up feeling stuck or unsuccessful for a simple reason: they haven’t defined success for themselves. By which I mean, they haven’t gotten specific about what they’re trying to accomplish. 

“I want to sell lots of books” is not the same as, “I want to make $55,000 a year so I can leave my day job to write full-time.”

“I’d like people to know who I am” is a long way from, “I intend to sell 10,000 books in the next six months.” 

And “I just want to find readers” is a lot more nebulous than “I want to have 1,000 reviews and a newsletter list of 1,000 subscribers.” 

When you’re specific, it's far easier to figure out the actual steps to take to reach your goal—which dramatically increases the likelihood of achieving it. So … why do so many of us remain vague? 

For starters, you may believe, deep down, that you can’t have what you really want. In response to this false belief, you stay hazy. I routinely hear writers say that they’re just trying to appreciate whatever comes their way … which is highly unlikely to be something they're actually happy with. In fact, a lot of what I do in coaching is untangling what a novelist thinks she “deserves” or is capable of. Why? Because with few exceptions, believing it’ll never happen leads to underperformance and less action. Which, of course, turns into poor results. 

Also, when you name your desire, you’re probably going to feel like—well, now you have to do something about it. And the human brain being the human brain, yours is likely to immediately respond with: “But I don’t know what to do!” 

That may be true in the moment. But here’s a deeper, more lasting truth: you can figure it out. 

Of course you’re not going to know every single action. But you can try things, learn from the experience, and adjust your next steps based on the data you're getting from your one-author experiment. (By the way, this is why I’m skeptical of paint-by-number marketing plans; what works for one author may not work for another, even when they share a genre and throughline.) 

“I don’t know” is a dream killer. It keeps us overwhelmed and frozen in inaction. So the next time you catch yourself thinking or saying it, try adding, “... and I’m going to try different things until I figure it out.”