How to create a 90-day publishing plan for your next book or project

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message, Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Have you ever wondered how to get out of overwhelm and to create a 90 day plan to move forward towards your 90 day goal? Hi, my name is Shelly Hitz. I'm the creator of authoraudienceacademy.com I'm the creator of Plan It Day, which is all about setting a 90 day breakthrough goal. And I am on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's time to let your light shine. In today's training, I'm going to give you a peek inside my planning for my upcoming book, Broken Crayons Still Color. I have honestly been overwhelmed. So I just got off of a live video. I was inside my private Facebook group for authoraudienceacademy.com I actually was in there and I wrote all this out. I did my brain dump. I had no prior planning or anything. It was just raw, real, and I made mistakes. I had to change things. But for 90 minutes, you got to see the process I went through to help create my plan for this book. Now, my 90 day plan actually became 120 day plan because I had to extend it. And that's okay. If you have a project that's gonna take a little bit longer, no sweat. Just do what you need to do to get that plan done. So if you're an Author Audience Academy member, that video's in there, warts and all. Like, you can watch it. If you find it helpful, great. If not, great. I mean, I just wanted to give you this recap of kind of the process that I went through and I hope that it helps you on your next project. So basically, if you're an Author Audience Academy member in the publish module, I have a checklist for you. That way you can fill in any holes in the process for your book and your publishing process. Make sure you don't miss any steps. And then if you have not set your 90 day goal yet, I encourage you inside Author Audience Academy, I have a complete training. It's called Plan It Day and it's all about setting your 90 day goal. Recently, I had a member and she was just like trying to figure out what to do, where to focus on, and I recommended she go through Plan A Day. She came out of there with so much more clarity, so much more strategy, and she is on fire. Like, it is so exciting. Every week she's like, I'm Doing this and now I'm doing that. Because now she has focus, she has clarity, she has a plan. So that's definitely available for you in Plan It Day. So what I did is I did a brain dump where I'm at now. I wrote everything out there, what needs to be done and I wrote all of that out. So that's what I recommend you do. Just get out some paper, pen, whiteboard, filter flip, chart, whatever works for you, mind mapping software and write out like, where are you at now? What have you done so far and what needs to be done now? For this particular project, I ended up categorizing it. Blue is my first draft that has to be done first. Red is my beta readers in a group. Because for this particular project I'm actually going to work through it, I think with a beta group and because I'm going to have some video training and stuff like that. And then the orange is the launch. So then once you do that and you kind of categorize it, then.

You set up your 90 day plan. And my 90 day breakthrough goal, at first it was October 1st and I realized it's going to be too much to get everything done. So I made it October 31st. And you want to set a date to your big goal. And my goal was to publish this book with a 12 week Bible study and videos by October 31st. So that's my breakthrough goal. That's going to be my focus these next few months. Now I have other things on my plate, I have other things I'm going to be doing, but that will be my overarching big thing that I'm going to be getting done. And then I broke it down into months. One month, two month, three month, four. And I kept it in colors. So the blue is the first draft, orange is the stuff I'm getting ready for my launch, and the red is the beta group. So that's the way I categorized it. You can do whatever you want and you can use whatever works for you. I encourage you to do that actually, because everyone is different, everyone works different and that is awesome. And then basically you take your list from your other page and come back over here.

So this list of what needs to be done, you start taking things off of this list and putting it onto your plan, putting it with dates, putting it in a timeline. And then as I did that, I was just crossing it off of here. So this is not in any particular order. This is just a brain dump of everything I need to get done. And then I take those things and I organize it into an order that works for me. Then guess what, you take this month and you start breaking it down into individual weeks. What will I get done this week? Week one in July, what will I finish on this list? Week one, what will I do? Week two, Week three, Week four in Author Audience Academy, every week we have a motivation Monday post. And on that post you write your weekly goals and those should kind of reflect back to your 90 day breakthrough goal. And I'm going to be doing that. I do this with you guys. I am in the trenches with you. I am not an author coach that just tells you what to do because I'm regurgitating stuff I've learned. If I'm telling you stuff I've learned, it's because I've actually done it myself. And so I'm actually going to be posting these things on the motivation Monday post in the group and walking through this each month. And like I said, if you're an author audience academy member and you don't have a 90 day goal yet, I encourage you to go into our academy and go through that training. Just scroll down until you see the icon, plan it day and the training is right there for you. You can set up your 90 day goal. This is third quarter, guys. July 1st started third quarter. So it's time for new goals, time for a new 90 day goal. And I want you to succeed. I want you to cross that finish line. I want you to do what God has called you to do. This project has felt so overwhelming and it's been so sitting on my plate for a long time. I knew I was supposed to write this book about a year ago and I just haven't done it. So I decided for accountability. And just to help you see the process, I decided in my Author Auditing's Academy group to show you and then I wanted to hop on here and just give you a quick recap of what I did. So I hope that you found this helpful. I hope that you take action, you set up your 90 day goal, your breakthrough goal, and then you start working towards it every week. So success takes time and you have to just continue to make decisions. It's about inching forward every week. It's not about just a big leap. It's not about me just getting out there and doing this big thing right now. This week. It's about me inching forward. It's about me just taking the next step, doing the next right thing, doing the next small thing, taking the next step. What is the next step for you? Do you need to do a brain dump? Do you need to set a plan? Do you need to. What is the next step? What do you need to hire a coach? I would love to serve you in Author Audience Academy as your author coach. There's plenty of other people that you can work with. If I'm not the right fit, what's the next step for you? I would love it no more than just to see you taking action, publishing your books, taking and reaching more people with your message, moving forward in your marketing and getting the success and the results that you want. I have a team, so I have people working for me. I am not going to do all of that work. I'm not going to be doing all of the formatting and setting up the webpages and setting up the lead magnets and doing all the technical stuff. I have a team helping me and I don't recommend starting with a project this big. So I have already published 40 books. I started publishing books in 2008. I've been doing online marketing since 2004, so. So I've been doing marketing for 12 years, publishing for a long. So this is not my first rodeo. If this is your first book, stay simple. Simple, simple, simple. Learn the process. Start with a short Kindle ebook. And you can do a short Kindle ebook every other month. So one month you're working on writing and publishing it, the next month marketing it. Now if you're going to do a bigger project like what I'm doing, it's going to take longer. So for me, I'm not really going to be focusing on publishing any other book books in the next four months. I'm going to focus primarily on this project. So I just think it depends on where you're at in the process. Like, is this your first book or how many books do you have? What kind of team do you have? Do you have the finances to hire people? Are you doing all this stuff behind the scenes yourself? Because if you're doing it yourself, give yourself time. You know, maybe even just one book a quarter. You know, one book every six months. So it just depends. And it's trial and error for every person. You are the only person that knows what's gonna work best for you as you work out your plan. So you have to work it out every day, every week. Just keep working out your plan, adjusting it as you need until you cross that finish line. And I just would love nothing more than to see you guys cross that finish line.

Oh, yeah.

I talk about that a lot.

You know, we're all on a journey. It's all a path that looks different for every single one of us.

And we all have a different calling. We all, you know, you may be a full time, you may be working full time, you may have five kids at home. I don't have any children. God has not blessed me with children. I've not been able to have children. That's been a very difficult thing for me. But because of that, I have a gift of time. So I can do a lot more things than some people that are moms that have like three to five kids and they're working full time and they're just really, really busy. So what season of life are you in? What experience do you have? What's the team that you have to support you? All of those things are going to depend on what's going to be best for you. I'd love to brainstorm it with you inside. Authoraudienceacademy.com I'm always brainstorming and available in our private Facebook group on a daily basis. So would love to talk with you more about that. I just want to do a recap on how to really just set a 90 day plan. It does not have to be complicated. It can be simple. You basically let me just recap. You set your 90 day goal. So you set your 90 day goal, then you do a brain dump. What have you done and then what needs to be done, and then you set up the tasks with dates so you can do that however you want. Like, you can do it like I did it and break it up into different months. You can break it up like, however you want, but you need dates. You need to set up some dates, set up some goals and realize, like, be flexible, be adaptable, realize that it can change. Like, when I was creating my 90 day plan, like I said, I actually was like, I have to push this back a month. It's just gonna be too much. It's gonna be too stressful. It's gonna be, I don't wanna rush it. This is a project. It's almost like my life project. I had that Twitter thing hanging in my head.

It's almost like my life project of just like finishing this book. It's going to encapsulate my life thus far at 41 years old. And so I don't want to rush it. It's not a book to be rushed. It's a book to allow it to really come out in the way God wants it to come out. And so every book project's different. I finished books in a week. Yeah, like seven days. Like there's been short Kindle ebooks I finished in a week. This is not one of those books. Yeah. So I mean, there can be seasons too. There can be a season where you say, okay, for the next three months, I'm going to publish one book a month. And then maybe the next 90 days you say, now I'm going to really focus on marketing or I'm going to focus on something else in the process. Maybe you focus on expanding your products. That's what I'm teaching right now as well. Inside Author Writings Academy in the Author Automation System, setting up small digital products anywhere from $7 to $97 on the back end to supplement your income to serve your target audience even deeper. And you can have it all automated. So it just depends where you're at. But I hope this was helpful. I'm excited to see what you guys do and I'll see you next time. Bye Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Aud. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her Six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.