Happy October, folks. Today is a great day because it’s the start of the fourth quarter.
October is a wonderful time of year to start thinking about your next year. What are your goals? Where do you want to be? Do your planning in October because November and December will fly by. December isn’t really a month, if you think about it. Everyone’s so focused on holidays and taking time off that the space between December 1st and January 1st is pretty quick.
I like to start my planning for the year in October so I can get all my ducks in a row by January and hit the ground running on January 1st.
Don’t wait to plan until January, or you will spend the year catching up.
Anyway, for reading, I kept reading IDW’s TMNT.
For data analysis, I did some pruning with my Amazon Ads to get my budget down a bit. I’m shooting for a 10% reduction this month and will see if it affects my profit. I don’t think it will. I had some ads that got away from me that were eating up clicks but not generating sales.
For marketing, I learned how to do a full cover spread—front cover, spine, and back cover. Very, very instructive. I played around with DALL-e’s outpainting feature. Essentially, you highlight your front cover and it draws a background on your spine and back cover that matches your front. It’s unbelievable. Example is below. Is it a bit awkward? Yes, but text is going to be overlaid on top of it anyway so most won’t even see the imperfections.
Also, I received my contributor’s copy of Writer’s Digest today—I have an article in it on estate planning for authors. Super cool! It’s in the September/October 2022 issue if you want to hunt it down.
For production, I wrote about 1600 words today. I desperately need to do some other non-writing tasks. I have some books to publish and formatting to do. Plus, I’m way ahead of my word count goal.
Anyhoo, thanks to everyone who attended the power hour today. We had a lively chat. Be sure to watch the replay.
Have a good night.
YTD Word Count: 118,000
Plan: 1,252,000
Words Over/-Under Plan: 21,750
Days Ahead/-Behind: 7.91
Projected Annual Word Count: 1,386,000
Projected Decade Word Count: 13,860,000
Deadline 12/31/2023
Days to Go Until 12/31/23: 456
Word Count Average: 3,371
Average Pulp Speed: 1.9
