It’s the first second Wednesday of the month and time for another posting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

I do this every year, and I seem to be getting better at setting SMART goals and achieving them. You can see last year’s goals and achievements here and here respectively.

Blogging
I’m sticking to mainly reading and reviewing books to share in April during the A-Z Challenge, and writing and publishing folklore blogposts for the same challenge. This feeds into the SMART goals. I’m also still doing weekly folklore podcast episodes.

As for the writing and publishing side…
I’ll continue work on my (top secret) pen names as they are quite lucrative and a lot of fun to write.
I’m also doing a big marketing push for the Irascible Immortals series: it’s (mostly) complete, so now I want everything done properly. And just have it over with (not in a bad way, just in the sense of starting fresh with another project). I’ll talk more about this next month.

With the disruption of AI on the book industry (especially by these yahoos), I’ve decided to add stickers to my books saying that they are written by a human. As Joanna Penn regularly says on her podcast for writers: double-down on being human. I’ll work systematically through my backlist to add them and update the back matter of each book (removing social media that I no longer use, etc.). I’ll have to update pages and posts on my website, too, to incorporate the new stickers, etc.
This fits in nicely with what Seth Godin discusses in his new book “This is Strategy” which I’m about half-way through (loads of work you have to do while reading it). There are (according to Seth) three reasons people make a choice: affiliation, status, and freedom from fear. Stating on my cover a book is written by a human, works well for those readers who prefer the depth of emotion a human author brings to a story; makes it a lot rarer than a book written by AI or assisted by AI during the writing process; and helps them to avoid the fear of AI taking over.

To be a better writer, I’m joining Lesley Penelope‘s Marginalia Book Club which is all about writing craft books. The book for January/February is “Make a Scene” by Jordan Rosenfeld.

I have all these stories that want to be written, and want to be shared, so I’m just focusing on doing my best to write them as well as I possibly can and to share them as widely as I am able to. I’m even thinking of learning how Kickstarter works, as it’s something a lot of authors in my genre use to get their series to their fans. We’ll see if there’s time to do that properly in 2025.
I even have a song for the year!
Eye of the Tiger by Survivor (video with lyrics):

What are your goals for 2025? Do you have a song to inspire you this year? Do you have a set strategy for your author career? You can find more author-centred posts here.
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No-one writes about the fae like Ronel Janse van Vuuren.
It sounds like you’ve got good, well-defined goals this year. I’m curious about your secret pen names. I hope you have a great 2025 and meet your goals.
Thanks, Natalie 🙂
You have a lot of books. Smart advice to promote one’s books as written by a human not AI.
Thanks, Alex 🙂
You read 235 books last year? 😮 How did you do that? Amazing. Great goal-setting for the new year!
Thanks, Jennifer 🙂 Some of the books I didn’t finish, but Goodreads still counts them.
Thanks for stopping by my blog. I like your stickers. It’s a good idea to let people know what to expect and to show that you are a real person.
Thanks, Toi 🙂
Those stickers are a great idea! I’ve started added “hand drawn” to my artwork as well.
Thanks! Great minds…
Great idea on the stickers. Happy New Writing Year.
Thanks, Sandra 🙂
Love the stickers. I wonder if we should all start marking our work as “human made.” I was looking at the Large Type sticker, too, and thinking that might be a better marker than the way I’ve been adding that line to my book covers. Much more visible, which is important since I don’ t use a different cover for those (I’ll also admit that I sell almost none; I do LT so that they can be put in the library at my mom’s retirement home).
Thanks, Rebecca 🙂 I know that stickers on covers always draw my attention, so that’s why I did it.
Great sticker idea. I think it’s going to be more and more necessary in the years ahead. And I love that your super secret pen name is doing well, and that it’s fun to write.
Thanks, Loni 🙂
I am assuming the stickers (like most of the covers) are virtual. Thinking about the logistics.
Yeah. I used Canva to create them and then paste them on my covers which I opened/imported in the appropriate Canva template [logo template to create stickers & book cover template for the cover] and then save and download as JPEG. Good luck!
Hi, Ronel! I thought I visited yesterday, but I must have been interrupted. Congratulations on achieving your SMART goals. And I love your song for the year. It’s long been a favorite of mine. AI seems to be complicating everything in our lives, so thanks for sharing your sticker plan. I haven’t been doing SMART goals. My big goal last year was to finally qualify medically for strabismus eye surgery and get my vision corrected. It was quite a journey and took almost three years, but I can see clearly now and am so grateful. And this year I’m focusing on getting more sleep and being kinder to myself, because I need to recover from the last three years. 😂. Then maybe I’ll be ready to tackle SMART goals. I guess I’d choose Teddy Swims song “Simple Things” for my song for 2025. Thanks for co-hosting. Wishing you the best as you move through 2025!
Thanks, Louise. My goal last year was to be kinder to myself and it was awesome. I’m so glad you can see well again.