I have lots of plans for 2019  but the biggest and most important has to be completing the Silence Sea Chronicles trilogy and publishing book 3!

For the next few months I will focus purely on this trilogy, which will consist of:

• Reading and making notes on The Lost Sentinel – book 1
• Reading and making notes on The Sentinel’s Reign – book 2
• Reading the draft of The Sentinel’s Alliance – book 3
• Completing the draft of book 3 as per my outline and notes.
• When the draft is completed and ready for my beta readers I want to focus on the map of the Silent Sea. At some point I plan to commission someone to produce a map but I’ve decided it’s more important to finish the books first.

Any advice you can give about map making would be gratefully received!

• Once the book is edited etc, there will be all the usual jobs involved in publishing a new book.

Future writing plans in 2019

I like to set out some of my goals for the year, even though I know I probably won’t have time for everything. It feels good to have a record and I love to tick things off a list!

• Write the prequel to Silent Sea Chronicles
• Release all four books in the Silence Sea Chronicles as a box set
• Republish all my paperbacks with ISBN’s and through a publisher Waterstones recognises.
• Approach indie bookshops as well.
• Keep trying to get my books into the libraries.
• Read ‘Writing Short Stories to promote your novel’ by Rayne Hall and action what I learn.
• Re-read the 72k partly written novel I am desperate to finish and actually finish it!
• Outline and draft the novella prequel to the above novel using the techniques I’ve learnt from Couch to 50k and Take off your pants – See below.

Other writing related plans

Reviews

• Review Couch to 50K by Rachel Tonks Hill once I have used the technique and discuss if it helped my writing.

• Review Take off your pants by Libbie Hawker once I’ve used the outlining techniques for some novel ideas. (By the way I chose this as my favourite writer’s guide of 2018 in this post.)

• Review ‘Writing Short Stories to promote your novels’ by Rayne Hall, as previously mentioned.

Embrace my self publishing journey by

• Contacting more reviewers
• Organising a blog tour for the release of book 3
• Buy KDP Rocket and use it to help with my book categories, keywords, ads etc.
• Work on getting audiobooks produced for all my books.
• Create a landing page on my website
• Decide if I’m ready to set up a mailing list / newsletter
• Go to writing events including Winchester and Gollancz scifi / fantasy.

Non writing plans for 2019

• Find a way to get more sleep.
• Fit in some exercise as often as possible.
• Get out with the family more.
• Read what I feel like reading without pressure as per my reading goals posted here.
• Fall in love with my garden again
• Be more adventurous cooking

That’s about all I can think of for now. I like to review my goals every quarter or mid-year, so it will be interesting to see how far I get with this list. As I stated at the start, the most important thing is working on book 3. Anything else will be a bonus!

Happy new year to you all and good  luck with your own goals whatever they might be.

***

You can follow me on

Twitter  Goodreads  BookBub  Amazon  Facebook