Getting Prepared for the Next 90 Days

What I do now determines what happens 90 days from now. This means that what I do now will show fruit at the beginning of March. Most businesses like mine are sitting back and enjoying the upcoming holiday. Any books that have been sold to retail outlets have already been sold. Any e-books that I sell during the next few weeks will be sold because of work that I have already done, much of it work that I did 90 days ago.
So what do I do now to prepare for the next 90 days? Getting out and trying to market books now is probably not the best use of time. As I said, stores and individuals are not buying books.

Closing Out This Year

Part of what I can do is work on doing what I can to wrap up this year’s work. I can work on catching up on financial reports so that I will be ready for the tax season. I can evaluate what I have done during the past year. I can determine what worked, what didn’t and what I can do differently during the next year. I can review my business plan and in the process further define who my target audience is, discover more about my peers in the business, I can evaluate early information that is coming out about how the industry did this past year.
In addition, I can look over the inventories and have a list of what I need to buy at the beginning of the year in regards to supplies I will need and books that I intend to sell.

Planning for Next Year

Part of getting ready for the next ninety days is developing goals for the next year.
Once I have gone as far as I possibly can in closing out this year, I can fill in more of what I intend to do during the next year. If I haven’t done it already, I should have develop a production schedule that tells what I will write during the next year. I will determine when I will finish first drafts, second drafts, get books to beta readers, and complete final edits.
I will also plan my marketing schedule for the upcoming year. I may or may not have details, but I can block out time when I should be doing certain things. Some of them will be based on what I did during the past year, some will be based on what I have learned from peer reviews and industry reports ,and still others will be based on ideas that I what to try that may be different from anything that anyone else is doing.
I need to determine a financial budget for the upcoming year based on income projections based on marketing strategies.
Finally, I will schedule quarterly reviews of all of the above to determine what I need to change or improve or tweak based on those reviews.
Once all of the basics in a scheduled format, I will divide the goals into quarterly goals with scheduled and dated deadlines and post them as a poster on the wall.

Determining More Detailed Goals for the First Quarter

Once the overall goals are determined for the year, it’s time to get more specific for the next three months (it’s a little more than 90 days but since it includes the next ninety days, bear with me. However, once I understand what I intend to accomplish during the next 90 days, I will be that much closer to success than I would have been had I not created this plan.

Donna Brown is pastor at Faith in God Church in Brandsville, Missouri.  As Author Cygnet Brown, she  has recently published her first nonfiction book: Simply Vegetable Gardening: Simple Organic Gardening Tips for the Beginning Gardener

She is also the author of historical fiction series The Locket Saga. which includes When God Turned His Head and Soldiers Don’t Cry, the Locket Saga Continues, and most recently, A Coward’s Solace, Book III of the Locket Saga.For more information about Cygnet Brown and her book, check out her website at http://www.cygnetbrow.com .