I’m in a lot of pain currently, but this happens from time to time. Too bad I wasn’t able to use my new exercise bike today!
Despite back pain, I still managed to shoot this week’s YouTube video even though it wasn’t the greatest quality. I am determined not to break my streak. My editor has been working on some bigger videos lately so I had to do my own thing this week. Shouldn’t be a problem moving forward. That’s what happens when you have your editor work on two video speeches that are 30 minutes long back-to-back.
In other news, my talk at the Escape the Plot Forest Summit went live today to around 3,000 registrants. Lot of great comments and really cool people. Picked up some new subscribers and sold a few books which is always a good thing. You can still sign up for the summit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ6KeUImw_Y
I also had a ridiculous idea this morning that I have no idea if it will work or not. It involves a draft, an exercise bike, and a lot of calories. 🙂 More to come, maybe.
Also, got registered for my LAST TWO law classes in the spring and also for graduation. Felt surreal applying for a May 2021 graduation application. Let’s hope I don’t fail my classes in the spring. 🙂
I fell down a rabbit hole today researching email parsing. I wrote about this in Indie Author Confidential Vol. 2. I’m fascinated by email parsing, and I have this nagging feeling that there’s something I can do with it to streamline my expense tracking. I’m exploring this as a major project in 2021. Currently, I spend about 2 hours per month tracking my expenses, and it’s a lot of data entry. I believe I can invest in an email parser that will split up the email into fields and pass the data I need into a database…and that database will keep tally of my expenses for the year. Combine this with AppleScript and I can save PDFs of emails into a folder system. All without me having to do anything. Each month, instead of data entry, I’d simply have to classify the expenses and do minor cleanup. And at the end of the year I can click a button and have a spreadsheet for my accountant. AND—a database that I can possibly join with my sales database to give me some additional tracking regarding revenue, profit, and expenses. This is the kind of stuff I think about on a daily basis…which leads me to strategy.
I also took the time to do some more strategy work for 2021, which is coming along very nicely. 2020 was the first year I stood this new strategy up; so far, I’ve had my best year yet. Partly because of the pandemic, but also partly because I believe the strategy is working, and projects & investments I started a couple years ago are starting to pay off.
2021 is all about doubling down on my strategy. Now that I have a year’s worth of experience living it, now it’s time to flesh it out a little deeper so that everything I do is more intentional and aligned. I’m feeling really good about what I have so far.
I’ll end with a question: if I did a separate livestream to talk about author strategy (how to set it, how to think about it), would you watch it?
Have a great Friday.
