As I’ve taken a look back at 2021, I’ve learned from both my mistakes and successes.

I wanted to share those with you today, in hopes that some ideas might ring true for you and help you to gain insight into your own process as an author.

Lessons Learned from Mistakes made this past year

This past year, I wrote and self-published two sweet romance books(with my pen name).

I wanted to write three books this year, but only wrote two. I didn’t meet my goal, so I took a mental review of what happened during this past year that slowed me down.

It really comes down to one thing: I allowed too many distractions to enter into my writing world and I didn’t focus as consistently as I should have.

I needed to face the reality of what really happened in 2021, because that is what helps to bring clarity about changes I need to make for this next year.

Part of those changes, means I need to have a new way to focus that helps bring consistency in my writing, publishing and marketing.

3 Key Areas to Help You Reach Your Writing Goals for this coming year…

1.Stay Consistent in your writing and self-publishing.

Do your best to plan your writing, editing and self-publishing dates so that you can reach them by the deadline you’ve set for yourself.

One of the lessons I learned from this past year, was that I need to plan more time to write so I don’t miss deadlines. I had to reschedule my editor twice because I was stuck near the end of the book and missed my deadline. So, this next year I am committed to focusing to reach a daily and weekly word count goal so I reach my deadlines in time.

Do you best to stay consistent with your writing and self-publishing deadlines and you’ll be pleasantly surprised how much you will accomplish in 2022!

2.Commit to 1 hour of Focused Writing time 5 days/week.

A lesson learned for myself from this past year, is that one hour of writing, sometimes meant that I was on Facebook for 30 minutes of that time. Which means I only had 30 minutes of writing time.

My goal is to have a focused hour of writing at least 5 days a week for this coming year. That way I am far more likely to reach my writing and publishing goals.

I want to encourage you to try this. You might be surprised how much you’ll get done with focused writing time.

3.Use the 80/20 Rule to cut those things that aren’t critical to your writing success.

This was another mistake I made. I allowed too many distractions(cat videos anyone?), to interrupt me, when I should have been focused on writing.

Most things don’t have to get done. In fact there are only a few that are critical to your writing success.  Focus on those critical things like writing and reaching your deadlines consistently.  This will accelerate your results and will allow you to cut a lot of time-wasting things that just drag you down.

Since, I have most of my book covers already done for this coming year, I will be focused on writing my books and giving myself two weeks of editing time before I self-publish each book.

I encourage you to try cutting out the time-wasting details that clutter your day — we each have them… lol 😉

Those are the three steps that I will be using to plan my 2022 more effectively so I can get more books written and published.

I really hope one or two of the above ideas are helpful for you as you plan your writing and self-publishing goals for the coming year!