Happy New Year to you!
It’s that time of the year when we all make our resolutions, and authors like me decide what our goals are going to be for the coming year.
I’m not completely convinced that I’ve ever got on too well with the word ‘goals’. For a very long time, goals have felt to me like those things other, more established, well-informed writers who actually have a clue what they’re doing can set and achieve, whereas goals for me have seemed to live in the same make-believe land as dreams.
For me, the last five years of trying to start something that resembled an author business has seen me wading in the mindset of ‘wannabe’ and ‘wannado’. I’m being brutally honest with myself here when I tell you this. I’ve flailed around, experimenting with a couple of different kinds of fiction under different pen names. I spent an inordinate amount of time under one pen name releasing fiction on my website to drive traffic, which it did. The problem was that it resulted in almost no actual reading customers. And, as my partner has pointed out to me on numerous occasions when I became a bit obsessed with driving traffic through unpublished fiction, why would they buy it when they can read it for free? Okay, so, lesson learned there!
There were a couple of things that altered my way of thinking during 2020. One was that I released a book that had been living under my skin, in my dreams and in every part of me for over a decade. It was a book I needed to write. I forced myself (as was possible in the utter nightmare that was 2020) to set myself a non-negotiable deadline and get the book written and published, which I did. And then… nothing. I don’t just mean I heard crickets when it came to sales. I realised two other things: despite this being the kind of book I had aspired to write, very little about it gave me joy. This sounds a bit crazy: I loved the characters, and one in particular for whom I think I ended up actually writing the book, and I loved the process of actually writing it. And more than anything, I loved, and will always love, the story I wrote – for me it will probably always be the book.
So what the hell was wrong with me? It was the story that filled me with passion to tell it and emotion when writing it. Yet it wasn’t the kind of story that made me want to get up in the morning. In fact, I actively avoided writing it for so long that it took a pandemic and a lockdown to put me in a position to write it. I had become so emotionally attached that I felt like I had to rip parts of me out and put them on the page. And when I released it, I felt – nothing. No elation, no joy, not even relief. It was as if it had removed my soul and left me with a shell, and it took a while to get over that.
All pretty weird and miserable, you think (this helped you how, Claire?!). But without this, I wouldn’t have done the next thing. Two things, actually, but they occurred simultaneously. I returned to drawing, which I’ve enjoyed all my life. From this, and through conversations with my loved ones, I decided that I was perfectly capable of creating books in a different way. So I set about creating my very first adult colouring book. Now, I’m the most un-techie person you could ever have the misfortune to meet, certainty if you want to talk about how computer programs work. I’m a ‘tell me what to press and I’ll press it’ kind of person. And this was pretty much how the colouring book came into existence!
I spent hugely joyful hours wading through my sketch books, drawing and re-drawing old and new ideas, and then turning it into a book with the amazing tech help and skills of my daughter and partner. Without them, and their encouragement to go back to something I enjoy doing, I would never have produced it. I can’t remember the last time I focused on a project with such enthusiasm and ferocity, so much so that the book went from initial conversation to release in just over six weeks. After a decade on my previous two books, this was something I never expected, and it really altered how I saw my future in publishing progressing.
The second thing that happened was that I remembered what my first love was. It was, and has always been, mystery fiction. I grew up with it, fell in love with it, and can’t leave it alone. It truly is my obsession. The pandemic really hasn’t needed to be an excuse for me to watch Poirot, but I’ve done it anyway. What has changed is my rediscovery of the mystery book. I have hundreds and hundreds of them at home, but I know that I’ve spent so long trying to ‘be a writer’ that I’ve forgotten that I’m a reader, too, and that I’m actually allowed to read for enjoyment. The latter part of 2020 saw me returning to curling up with mystery fiction – and I can’t believe just how much I’d forgotten how wonderful it is, and how I can get completely lost in a story. In a year which has been so awful is so many ways, spending some time just loving what is going on in my head as I absorb the mystery has done wonders for my mental health.
Coinciding with this are also the discussions I have had with my partner over the possibility for writing a historical mystery series, which I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Once again, fun came into the equation, as we chatted about how the characters could behave, and bounced around different ideas for plot elements and had a great time trying to figure out whodunnit and why.
So, as I got into the last few days of 2020 and I sat in my flat, still eating up the Christmas food and devouring books and mysteries, something in my brain just clicked. I owned up to the fact that I’ve been spending too many years in the ‘wannabe’ and ‘wannado’ mindset of being a writer/publisher. I was angry with myself, but also forgiving of all the mistakes I’ve made, because without them I wouldn’t have been failing, which means I wouldn’t have been trying, either.
Up to this point at the end of December, I’d told myself I was a professional, full-time indie author. I’m really not sure whether I’ve ever believed it, because if I had, I wouldn’t have felt so unnerved at the thought that I could actually put the work out there and publish it and keep doing it, instead of wasting so much time avoiding actually doing the work that I know I want to do, just in case it fails, or maybe in case it actually succeeds. I went from wondering what gives little me the right to think she is an author to telling myself that I am an author, and that it’s my full time career and it’s also the thing I love, and it allows me to deal with those things I enjoy most in the world, every single day. I told myself that I’m allowed to focus on those parts of an author/publishing business that I know I can do well and that bring me joy and learn the parts that I’m not so good at or that I’m clueless about one at a time, rather than letting overwhelm about all those things I think I should be doing take over and prevent me from doing anything at all.
Most of all, I gave myself permission to enjoy what I want to do and to tell myself that this career isn’t just for those who know what they’re doing, and for those fantastic authors I respect and who I take advice from through their books and podcasts. I can do it, too. Because there is absolutely nothing to prevent me, except me. And I can set goals, even if I play mind games with myself to treat them as challenges.
So, and with apologies for the long-winded arrival at this point, I’d like to let you in on my creative goals for 2021. These are my watch words for the year: focus, content, visibility. Creating content with a focus and purpose is something that will help my books become visible to readers who might like them, and it will take a concerted, consistent effort.
But my overarching theme for the year is ‘finish what you’ve started’. I’m really good at beginning lots of projects; I get excited by an idea and I begin, and it’s wonderful – but it’s also a recipe for disaster when that initial fervour doesn’t last, and I lose interest in the project. It does become a means of filtering out the ideas that really don’t have ‘legs’, but it can also leave me with a computer and notebooks full of unfinished work which I haven’t time to complete, which seem too vague and fluffy to finish at that time, or sometimes which I’m just too scared to try and tackle. There are so many books that I could have written, if only I’d finished everything that’s lurking in folders buried somewhere in the depths of my hard drive and writing cupboard. I’m also very, very good at detracting from the job at hand (cue staring out of the window, doing the washing, hoovering, taking out the recycling, washing up, wandering off and doing umpteen other things not in the slightest bit related to the thing that I’m meant to be focusing on).
I often find that these ‘beginnings’ sit in different genres, too. I think that, sometimes, I get so bogged down in what I should be trying to do with my project that I can’t unravel it in my head – hence the detraction jobs. So this year, I’m taking some of these unfinished projects and creating work that fits exclusively in that genre I love so much: crime and mystery fiction. Now, these are going to fit in various sub-genres, which I think gets me around the worry of what I should write and leaves me to concentrate on what I want to write. But there will always be dreadful deeds at their heart. I am going to focus my writing on three types of crime and mystery fiction:
Dark, gothic-style crime
Historical crime
Cosy mystery
I’ve taken a lot of time to think this over, and I don’t see the point in writing what makes me emotionally pained and leaves my loved ones suffering around me because they’re not sure how they can help me get over it. Therefore, the three sub-genres of crime and mystery fiction are now my focus, going forward. I have read and watched extensively in these sub-genres, and they will definitely overlap when it comes to my stories.
As I mentioned my art, I also want to declare here, that I intend to continue to create more colouring books for adults. I know it’s not part of the grand crime fiction plan, but I do already have a dedicated website (claireladdsart.com if you’re interested) and a clear readership, so that’s running parallel with my writing.
Thinking, too, about the overarching theme of starting what I finish, I need to translate into my publishing. There are books I have published in one or maybe two formats, but that’s all. There are sales platforms that I’m not currently selling on and I’m telling myself I should be. Both my future books and my backlist need to be available to as many people in as many formats, and sold in as many ways, as I can manage.
The other focus of my creative output this year is content. I don’t mean my books, the finished products, but the other content I create which (hopefully!) readers find interesting and useful, and which creates a more direct connection between me and the people who read what I put out there.
So, my writing (or maybe my creative and publication) goals look like this:
Writing
Tick, Tick, Tick (Gothic crime set in Victorian times)
Book 1 in Gothic crime/mystery series, title yet undecided
Book 2 in Gothic crime/mystery series, title yet undecided
Book 3 in Gothic crime/mystery series, title yet undecided
Book 1 of a historical crime trilogy – I think)
Book 1 in Victorian mystery series
Book 2 in Victorian mystery series
Book 3 in Victorian mystery series
Short story/novella crime collection
Also in planning – 3 books in new mystery series, time period yet undecided, although likely 1920s/30s
Book 2 in adult colouring
Book 3 in adult colouring
Book 4 in adult colouring
Book 5 in adult colouring
Book 1 in cute colouring range
Book 2 in cute colouring range
All books to be available direct from me in ebook (fiction) or downloadable PDF (colouring)
Publishing
Baby up the Chimney in paperback in places other than only Amazon
The Reason for Everything in paperback in places other than only Amazon
Tick, Tick, Tick in ebook and paperback
Book 1 of historical crime trilogy in ebook and paperback
Book 1 in Gothic crime series in ebook and paperback
Book 2 in Gothic crime series in ebook and paperback
Book 1 in Victorian crime series in ebook and paperback
Short story/novella crime collection
Content
Readers’ Club get an email every couple of weeks (plus extra at launch times), with some content that is exclusively for them. This gives me direct contact with those people who want to know even more about what I do, how I work and find that I or my work resonate with them.
Release a blog post every week on this website to connect with more readers and give a general insight into me, my books and the stuff I love to write.
Set up and release a weekly blog on my other website (which currently you can’t access, but I’ll keep you informed of progress). This deals exclusively with mystery fiction and the themes which occur
The big, scary one – start a podcast linked to the website I’ve not named. I’m not going to say any more about this one right now, but as one of the shyest, most introverted people you could ever meet, this one presents a challenge that takes me right outside my comfort zone.
There we have it – my possibly unrealistic, challenging and a little bit scary goals for 2021. If you’d like to come along for the ride and get the insider info on these and any other potty ideas I might throw at myself along the way, do feel free to join me in my Readers’ Club (you can read your welcome gift while I’m prising myself away from the window, washing machine and the recycling bins!).
I promise to report back on these creative goals at the end of the year, and we will see just how I got on.
Happy reading!
Leave a Reply