Motivation

Monday Motivation.

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Bookstore meme by Lizzie Chantree

Happy new week everyone. What inspires your writing? For me it’s either getting to a point in a new story that I can’t wait to write, or sitting somewhere with a beautiful view. Just taking in the scenery is often enough to lift my mood and make me want to start writing. If you are feeling frustrated with finding time to write, then taking a walk and a notepad can refresh your mojo enough to get back to your work flow when you return.

I carry a notepad everywhere and often jot down characteristics of people I see when I’m wandering around and I like to note clothing, stance, how people use their hands to express themselves and other details like that. It comes in handy when I’m forming characters in my mind. Although they are often jumping up and down and introducing themselves before I’ve finished the previous manuscript, so I have to hold them back and tell them to be patient.

I hope you find some amazing new books to read this week!

Homesick meme by Lizzie Chantree

 

Monday Marketing.

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Lizzie Chantree Monday Marketing2

 

Happy 2019 everyone. Here are my marketing tips for today. This post is about setting new goals for yourself. Promotion and marketing can seem so daunting, but putting pressure on yourself to write and find new readers can cause extra stress, so these tips might prevent that from happening.

  1. Set yourself small and achievable goals to help make marketing seem less of an uphill struggle. Give yourself tasks like: Add 50 Twitter followers in a week. Build and promote your Facebook fanbase by getting 20 more likes in a week. Obviously scale this to how active your accounts already are. You might think adding 1,000 followers is achievable, so give yourself realistic targets.
  2. Set up tweets about your book/writing twice a day. Make them different and interesting.
  3. Submit your book to at least three blogs, magazines, review sites per week.

Challenging ourselves with small goals helps us to stay focussed and when we meet those targets, we feel good about it and want to try harder. If we have too many things to do on our lists, we can feel overwhelmed and then nothing gets done at all. Stick with what works and discard anything that doesn’t’t bring the results you are aiming for. Just add a different topic to the top of the list. Have a great week. From Lizzie.

For tips about repetition in marketing click here.

Get writing!

/ lizziechantree / 10 Comments

Happy new week everyone. Today’s post is about motivation. What motivates you to get up in the morning and then sit at your desk and create your products, or write your books or blog posts? For me it is the feeling of accomplishment when I see a finished manuscript. At present, I am only about 5,000 words into my latest novel, which is the sequel to Ninja School Mum. It’s hard to stay motivated when you still have 75,000 words to write, but the thought of holding that book in my hands when it’s ready, is worth the time it takes to write it.

Lizzie Chantree book quote 7

After a lengthy and exciting book launch for Ninja School Mum, it has taken me a while to re-energise and get back to my routine of 1,000 words a day if I can, as a minimum. This week, to motivate myself, I have written a ten point list of goals for the week and scheduled writing time into each day. This might sound silly, but writing time is very easily overlooked when the washing needs doing, the school run organising, the dinner prepared and the housework and shopping completed. Actually writing a weekly plan for when I will sit down at my desk without interruption, gives my week structure and makes me push other tasks aside for after my writing time.

I have been known to write 5,000 words in a day, or as few as 50, so I will let you know how my plan works. The main point here, is to stop procrastinating and to get writing!

You can’t edit a blank page.

My 10 point goals for the week: Schedule time for each point.

  1. Write 1,000 words a day of my latest manuscript.
  2. Write a blog post for Monday.
  3. Post in my Facebook group, Lizzie’s Book Group.
  4. Visit 4 other blogs to support them.
  5. Write the questions for my networking hour #CreativeBizHour on Twitter.
  6. Post to my author Facebook page.
  7. Post to my author Instagram page.
  8. Write guest posts for other blogs.
  9. Update Twitter feeds daily.
  10. Cover design for my latest book, out in July.