Setting Goals for My Children's Book in 2016

I am sitting at Archive in Salem with my bestie, the poet Stephanie Lenox, for our now annual goal-setting meeting.

Goal-setting is literally my favorite thing to do.

I ADORE goals.

Goals are like birds in eggs, waiting to hatch!

But I'm always careful about what I put at the top of my list because as we all know, what gets put at the bottom does not happen.

Over a killer latte, with a stream of good-looking 20-somethings wafting through the door, I wrote this list of goals for Tessalation!, my children's book on tessellations. I divided my goals into three sections: Production, Budget and Marketing.

Here I am with Stephanie at Archive, caffeinating and planning for world domination in 2016!

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PRODUCTION Goals

​1. Finalize the text.. I keep waffling a bit on the words in my book and I really just need to decide that it's done.
2. Coordinate with brother-in-law Jeff. I've hired him to make the images consistent in terms of saturation, palette and size and he is also helping me choose typeface and positioning for the words.
3. Explore publishing options. Whew. That's a big one. I've already begun the process, and will write about that in a later post, but for now, thank freakin' God, it's just a line item in my to-do list.

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BUDGET Goals

​Decide how much I am actually willing to spend to get this baby out in the world. My only budget items so far are my illustrator's fees, which have been a little over $400. I need to seriously considering where my cap is here.

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MARKETING Goals

This might actually take up the bulk of my time with regard to this book, since so much of the production will occur on someone else's watch. 

1. Brainstorm blog posts for 8 weeks (I actually did that this morning and ended up with blog post ideas through May of 2016. Blogging! Not so hard, actually. And fun!
2. Blog for an aggregator site like Hubspot -- I've done this with other projects and seen a lot of traffic come in, so it's worth a try
3. Brainstorm and connect with organizations that would appreciate the message of my book. I've got a lot of ideas here: Mother's Groups, Women in Math, Puzzle People, you know, the whole gamut. I'll write a blog post about how to do this.
4. Find my helpers. No books are born on their own, so I'd love to find some fans that would be willing to post about the project
5. Create a How to Make a Tessellation tutorial for YouTube. My brother-in-law Jeff might be a good resource here.
6. Finalize a marketing plan. On it! 
7. Decide on a platform. Where am I going to publish this? Amazon? Createspace? Lulu? Where?
8. Make a Book Trailer. Actually, my friend, the amazing Wendy Dale is already on this!
9. Launch this book! These aren't all the steps I'll need to take to get my book out into the world, but I've covered the basic categories I'll be exploring on this blog in 2016!

Are you writing a children's book or do you plan to in 2016? What are your goals? Have I missed anything? Please link to your project!