Why I don’t like goals

I’ve been thinking about goals and habits and systems again. I’ve talked about those things many times in the past, and I have continually chased goals and failed to meet the vast majority of them. I’m really getting tired of failing.

A forum post I read today talked about how binary the whole goal mentality is: succeed or fail. Sure, you can play mind games with yourself and try to remember that you haven’t actually failed if you’ve made progress, but… really? When you set a goal, if you don’t reach it, your brain is going to tell you you’ve failed. And too much failure definitely takes a psychological toll.

Just yesterday I had a talk with my son about how I’d made 2016 sound like my worst year for writing since I’d started publishing. But it wasn’t. It was very close to an average year, and better even than 2014.

2012: 146,821
2013: 268,191
2014: 217,641
2015: 250,011
2016: 220,017

The monthly averages show how close those numbers really are:

2012: 24,470
2013: 22,349
2014: 18,137
2015: 20,834
2016: 18,335

But it felt like a terrible year, all the way around, because I had set such large goals at the beginning of the year and I came nowhere near reaching them. 2016 was the year I tried to write 1,180,000 words in 12 months; it was the year I decided 4,558 was a reasonable number of words to expect from myself most days.

Looking back, I have no idea what I was thinking.

Smashwords is finally about to start paying monthly

Some good news from Smashwords to end the year:

Smashwords Plans for 2017

In broad strokes, below is what you can expect from Smashwords in the coming year.  If some of this looks familiar to our goals for 2016 (most of which we met), it’s because some of these items below will remain persistent themes for us for many years to come:

  • Faster payment cycles – January will be our last quarterly payment round, after which Smashwords is going monthly starting in February.  Yay!

Yay is right. I distribute to Apple through Smashwords, although the day might come when I’ll decide to buy a Mac and go direct (or Apple will finally get a clue and realize they should stop making it so difficult for authors to publish on their platform!) and I sell a few books through OverDrive and LibraryDirect and from the Smashwords’ store itself.

After the mess with All Romance Ebooks, I’ll be glad—ecstatic really—to finally be receiving monthly payouts from all the distributors/retailers I use.

Links and a comment about All Romance Ebooks

This morning I spent a bit of time reading up on the All Romance Ebooks closing. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned, but I’ve decided to ignore the settlement offer of .10 on the dollar for the $780 I’m owed. On the other hand, I’m still undecided* if I’ll bother pursuing the issue, because I know how that will interfere with my ability to concentrate on what’s important to me in 2017. The world is full of thieves, but it’s also full of really good people, and I just don’t know that I have time to bother with the thieves for that amount of loss. If it had been more money, my reaction I’m sure would be different. But I admit to a feeling of apathy about the money, and maybe that’s a sign that I really do need to concentrate on other things for the moment.

Besides, by not taking the settlement, until or unless ARe goes into bankruptcy, they’ll continue to owe me that money and I’ll continue to be able to go after it at a later date.

Here are some links related to the issue:

December 31, 2016 (Kristine Kathryn Rusch @ Patreon) Business Musings: All Romance Ebooks & Visions of The Future: Part One

December 30, 2016 (Writer Beware) All Romance eBooks’ Sudden Closing: Many Questions, Few Answers

December 30, 2016 (BlogCritics) Court Documents Regarding All Romance E-Books’ Disturbing Business Practices Surface

December 29, 2016 (BlogCritics) Publisher All Romance Ebooks: Closing Hits New Low In Stealing From Authors

December 28, 2016 (The Digital Reader) All Romance eBooks is Shutting Down (I’m the unattributed quote! I don’t remember ever being quoted before, so that’s funny.)

December 28, 2016 (Romance Writers of America) All Romance eBooks Closing Dec. 31

In several comments and articles, people mention the site being down, but I haven’t had any problems getting into ARe’s website. The first day there was a bit of slowness, but it has come up every time for me since. And of course, I downloaded my spreadsheet of sales the moment I received the email and it matched the monthly reports I download, so nothing had changed for me as some people have reported happening to them. In fact, I’ve just gone and made a screenshot now and it still shows the same amount due.

If I come across any more interesting news about it, I’ll update this post instead of writing a new one.

*In the time since I posted this, I’ve decided to accept this loss and move on. I just don’t believe I’ll ever collect enough to make it worth my time or energy to even try. Now that 2017 is here, I’m turning my attention to making 2017 an awesome year for my writing and my income.