Take Consistent Action to Achieve Your Goals

Are you taking consistent action to meet your writing or marketing or publishing goals?  In the first place, do you have a goal or dream? If so, are you writing down the goal then taking consistent action to achieve it?

Last week I was at Author 101 University in Los Angeles. This life-changing event happens twice a year. Each time I meet new authors and also reconnect with some of my publishing colleagues. Several of these colleagues who are active in the publishing community also want to write books.  As a part of our conversation, I make a point to ask them about the book and see if they are making progress.  Yes, they still want to write the book but have been consumed with other things so their book writing has taken a backseat and hasn't been happening.

I'm empathetic about their situation of trying to write a book in the middle of other business. Then I encourage them to be writing their book in small pieces—even 200 words a day can add up to become a completed book. It will only happen if you take consistent action to achieve this goal.

At the event, I met a new writer who was enthused about building her presence in the market and using different tools like Twitter. She was aware of the frequency of my tweets and that I was providing excellent content on a consistent basis. How did she know? This writer had set her phone to beep every time I sent a tweet. I've written a number of articles in The Writing Life about the different tools and methods I use for my social media. It is not time consuming but to grow a large following, you do have to take consistent action.

Every day I'm adding content to my Twitter feed and always looking for good articles to pass on to others along with my own content. I'm also consistently growing my own followers and social media presence. Whether I'm traveling or at home, I regularly work on these areas. The constant effort pays off and if it doesn't then you stop that action and try something else.

I didn't suddenly have over 150,000 twitter followers. I've been growing it gradually. I didn't instantly write over 550 customer reviews on Amazon or gain 5,000 friends on Goodreads. These milestones took place with consistent action. For this blog, I'm a few articles away from having 1300 different articles. This large volume of content was built through consistent action.

What types of goals or dreams do you have for your writing and publishing life? Do you want to sell more books? If so, then you need to be increasing the number of people that you tell about your book. Make an action plan and then consistently execute that plan so you can achieve your goals. It does not happen overnight but can happen—provided you take action.