Not only is the new year fast approaching, but it’s also the start of a new decade. Now is the time to focus on what you want your Expert Author business to be in 2020 and beyond. Spend some quiet time this month, thinking about what you want your business to look like in December 2020.

If you’re in the process of writing and publishing your book, your goals could center around completing your book project and launching it. If you’re a published author, your goals might center around how you plan to use your book to increase your authority and get more business.

Regardless of the category you’re in, write your goals down and refer to them frequently. There is power in visualizing the achievement of your goals. As I learned from Napolean Hill’s book, Think and Grow Rich, the very act of writing your goals creates a reaction in your subconscious that helps you achieve them.

You’ve probably already heard of SMART Goals but here’s my spin on them for nonfiction authors:

Your goals should be SPECIFIC

Woman in spotlight

That means they should spell out precisely what success will look like if you achieve the goal. For example: Grow my Facebook Followers is vague. Grow my Facebook Followers by 10% every month is specific. When you use specific language, you set an expectation in your subconscious mind and will automatically start thinking of ways to make the goal come to fruition.

Your goals should be MEASUREABLE

man hanging on skyscraper

Notice that in the example above, I used a number to quantify success. Let’s suppose one of your goals is to get five speaking engagements so that you can sell your books at those events. You will naturally start thinking about how you can get those five speaking engagements. That will make it easier to figure out the tasks you need to do such as identifying conferences and events in 2020 that contain your target audience.

Your goals should be ACTIONABLE

woman typing on bench outside

It’s not enough to document your goals, although I recommend you write them down. You also have to create a plan to achieve them. You first have to make time in your daily and weekly schedule to work on your goals. Next, you have to break each goal down into specific tasks. If your goal is to publish your book in 2020 using my Author Fast Track program, the major steps are: Plan your book, Write your book, Publish your book, and Launch your book. Each of those major steps has sub-steps to be planned as well.

The entire schedule is laid out in Book Smart and it’s the process I follow with private clients.

Your goals should be REALISTIC and RELEVANT

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There’s a difference in having goals that are aggressive versus goals that are unrealistic. If you’re a first-time author, it’s unrealistic to think you’ll sell thousands of books in the first year.

In order to get a large number of sales, you need to be established as the top authority in your field or you need to have a large marketing budget and public relations team. The average nonfiction book sells about 300 copies over its lifetime.

Determine what a realistic goal is for where you are in your authority building. By the same token, your goals should be relevant to your quality of life goals. If you live in a small town and don’t like to travel, don’t create a goal of doing lots of speaking engagements. Chance are, you will have to travel varying distances to achieve a speaking goal. In that case, you might have a goal of doing a certain number of Webinars. Using that strategy, you can reach a lot of people without leaving home.

Your goals should be TIME-BOUND

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A goal is just a dream if there’s no time limit. One of the ways to build authority is to write articles and blog posts and create video content. More content means more opportunities for the search engines to find you and start serving up your content in search results.

If your goal is to write twelve long-form articles in 2020, but you wait until October to write them, you won’t get the benefit until the following year. It’s much better to have a goal to write one long-form article every month to create consistency and relevancy.

One of the things I learned in a recent class hosted by Google is that their goal is to make the person searching happy. What that means is putting the most up to date and specific information at the top of the search results.


Over the course of 2020, I’ll be rolling out more tools to help you achieve your publishing goals. You can start by downloading my free SMART Goals Quick Guide and Worksheet.

I’m also putting the finishing touches on a new planner and calendar for published and aspiring authors. Stay tuned for the announcement in a couple of weeks.

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Linda Griffin
Linda Griffin

Linda Griffin is the founder of Expert Author 411. She believes becoming a published author will put any business owner heads and shoulders above their competition. Ms. Griffin is the author of two books: Maximum Occupancy: How Smart Innkeepers put Heads in Beds in Every Season and Book Smart: The Ninety-day Guide to Writing and Self-publishing for Busy Entrepreneurs, Business Owners, and Corporate Professionals. Both are available on Amazon at amazon.com/author/lindagriffin