YORK - ROMANCE YOUR GOALS

This one is for myself, because positive self-talk has gotten me through the worst of it more than once

A genre fiction writing career is a roller-coaster. The climb is scary. The fall is terrifying. And once I figured out the tricks of it, I fell in love with the ride.

ZOE YORK (AKA AINSLEY BOOTH) USA TODAY & NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR

Our publishing business is an extension of who we are and what we want in life. In order to find success at genre fiction writing, authors need to figure out which projects will move them towards their ideal career. In Romance Your Goals, New York Times and USA Today bestselling romance author Zoe York lays out a new framework for creating a chain of goals, achievable mile markers that point you in the right direction.

This book includes:

• decision-making tools you can add to your career management toolbox
• further expansion on the Series 2.0 concept, and how progressive career growth can happen without breakout bestseller success
• support for knowing when to take your writing career in a new direction

Zoe York is a thirteen-time USA Today bestselling author of contemporary romance, often with military heroes, and always with scorching heat on the page. Between her two pen names (she also writes erotic romance as Ainsley Booth), she has published more than fifty books since her 2013 debut, What Once Was Perfect. Notable career highlights include Prime Minister (USA Today bestseller twice, in 2016 and 2017), the SEALs of Summer anthologies (New York Times bestsellers in 2014 and 2015), and the fan favourite Canadian small town series, Pine Harbour and Wardham. She is a mouthy and proud member of Toronto Romance Writers.

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The whole reason I have written this series of non-fiction books is because people on Twitter seem to like my thoughts on publishing. Thank you to all the enablers.

A special thanks as well to Susan Hayes, who was an early sounding board for the ideas I developed, and my WBF coach, Nikki Haverstock, who kept me focused through multiple existential crises. I appreciate their support!

I also want to thank every author who reached out to me after I gave a presentation at Romance Author Mastermind 2020 with the same title as this book. I hadnt planned on writing a third non-fiction resource, but hearing that my story and the lessons I have learned resonated with my peers gave me the push to expand some of those concepts into what is laid out here. So in turn, Im very grateful to Skye Warren for hosting RAM, and fostering a community inside which we can have real conversations about what it takes to shoot for the stars.

If you have read Romance Your Brand and Romance Your Plan, one of the questions I ask in the first few chapters of this book will be familiar: in five years, what do you want to have written? What do you want to be known for?

I return to it in this book, because I return to it often in real life. As I said in the introduction to Romance Your Brand, for me, every day is the first day in a new five-year plan.

That has never been more true than in the two years since I released RYB. My five-year plan in the fall of 2019 did not include a global pandemic, but here we are. So we take stock, revise our vision, and start again.

A genre fiction writing career is a roller-coaster. The climb is scary. The fall is terrifying. And once I figured out the tricks of it, I fell in love with the ride.

But before we dive into goal setting and how this book fits into the Publishing How To series with Romance Your Brand and Romance Your Plan, I want to establish this as a baseline fact: Im a peer on this writing and publishing journey.

Im not an expert on anything other than how to be Zoe York. I dont do consulting or run a course. These three books are my contribution to the collective knowledge bank, and everything I say should be weighed against the balance of what you know from your own experiences and what you learn from others. Always be learning is a great motto! Im a big fan of treating professional development as an ongoing part of being a commercial genre fiction writer.

In fact, this book is a direct result of some of the professional development I did following the release of Romance Your Brand. In November 2019, I attended Romance Author Mastermind in Houston (organized by Skye Warren, whose author newsletter I recommended on the reading list at the back of RYB). The year that followed was one of the best, most-focused years Ive had as a romance author, even as I navigated the global pandemic (which hit my muse hard, and Ill get into that in a dedicated chapter), in part because I did an author business mastermind with Holly Darling and started to integrate an author mission statement into my process. When RAM 2020 went virtual, and Skye asked me to fill in when a speaker had to back out at the last minute, I knew exactly what I was going to talk about: goals.

That was the first version of Romance Your Goals.

And then, after I gave that presentation, everyone was talking about HB90 with Sarra Cannon (a quarterly planning week for authors), so I took that course at the end of 2020.

So at this point, in the fall of 2021, as I write this introduction, I can tell you that what youre about to read is a snapshot in time, the perspective of a peer on this journey, captured at the eight and a half year mark into her career.

I can promise that my thoughts about goals will continue to evolve. I will learn new, better, more interesting tools. I will have setbacks.

I have tried to anticipate that in the framework I present in the following chapters. Because I have ridden the rollercoaster a few times now, and I think I have some hot tips for making the ride more enjoyable.

Buckle in.

Im going to spend a lot of this book talking about myself, and my goals, and I dont want you to mistake any of that for universal advice.

I'm not a goal-setting expert, just as Im not a brand expert, or a marketing expert.

Im just a girl with ADHD who communicates entirely in analogies, because I see patterns and really like analysis.

But what really matters as you start this book is that you remember I want you to centre yourself in those analogies. See if they fit. If they feel right, if there are points that resonate, highlight them and make them your own.

If there is anything that doesnt feel right, thats important, too. It might remind you of other times that items have snuck onto your to-do list that arent