I’ve spent the last few days putting around with In Dreams of Trees, but it’s time to put that book aside to ferment and focus on what I need to do in 2012.

It’s odd thinking of writing in the same mindset as I’m thinking about the horses. The idea of non-NaNo deadlines and posting schedules and targeted audience building is strange—but it’s something I need to get settled in before January rolls around.

Books Are Not Always Stories

One of the things I wanted to get done in December was create some dollar books to put up in the store to help fill the shelves. These will be made of content taken from the blog and just repackaged in an easier to read format.

I’m planning on doing Saturday Story Prompt collections and Daily Snippit collections, since they’re the easiest to pull together, but I’m also looking over the megablog for other topics. Short how-to guides could easily be worth a dollar, so I’m thinking of outlining non-fiction blog post series meant for both mediums.

Right now my goal is to finish one of these dollar books a week in December. How often I can finish one come 2012 will all depend on how hard the blog series are to write. *pokes Muses*

Stories Are Not Always Books

I’m still overly fond of the idea of Serial Stories, so I’m sticking to my guns on that concept. As you can tell by the silence from The Wolves We Are, it’s something I obviously need more practice at.

The plan right now is to finish Wolves in December (since it’s only a short story) and get it ready for January-February posting. The goal right now is to have a cycle of eight-post serial stories running all year long with a possible novel in a second queue for the latter half of the year.

If I can write a 50k NaNo novel in a month, I should be able to write a polished 8k serial story in the same time frame. At least in theory. *crosses fingers*

Time To Get Traditional

One of my subgoals for 2012 is to get one piece of fiction traditionally published, for values of ‘traditionally’ that consist of ‘someone pays me for it.’ Right now I’m leaning heavily towards the flash fiction markets, since that’s where most of my experience lies, but I’m not averse to throwing an actual short story in the ring.

I’m well aware that I can’t publish anything I’ve posted to the web, but there’s no rule about writing things set in the same universes… which will hopefully draw readers back to the website looking for more.

Finding My Readers

There are a lot of authors out there, so any marketing is good marketing and traditional publishing is just another publicity venue. I’m going to be audience building for quite a while, unless I manage to win the author lottery, so it’s up to me to buckle down and learn the whims of the market.

I need to find out where people go looking for stories, what their expectations are in an eBook , and how to make sure that people are pleased with what they are buying. I’m well aware that I can’t please everyone, but I’d like to do my best to make sure that what they are getting is what they expected to get.

*puts on her Adventuring Hat* Now it’s time to cowboy-up and put my words where my mouth is!