One of the big ways I plan on paying for this castle and to help fund the running of the retreat, is essentially my own creativity. Just in case anyone reading this doesn’t know, I write novels. I’ve written quite a few already in various genres.
So far these are getting me toward my goal, but if I’m going to get to the amount of money needed any time soon, I’m going to need my books to pick up some of the slack. This blog is also partially about me helping people.
I firmly believe that on the way to big goals and dreams, it helps to start doing the parts that can be done already, so on Monday’s I’m going to blog a bit more about the creativity side of things, marketing, publishing, trying to make money from my creativity.
This is also part of the plan, which I started to mention last week. A dream has to be turned into a goal and then a plan has to be made to reach the goal.
Writing good books at a good pace is a big part of the plan. Marketing them is another part of the plan. So, this last week, I spent a lot of time setting this up, writing books I have contracts for and already promised readers and starting to think about how all this aligns with my goals.
I’ve already worked out that I write faster without dropping the quality of my work if I have at least two books to work on at once. My mind can be mulling over plot issues from one in the background while I work on the other.
The last month or so, I’ve pushed that up to five to see if there was an upper limit to the number. I think we’ve discovered that it needs to be three or four in at least two genres. It’s been a bit too much to keep straight in my head.
It’s okay to discover that though. It might change in the future, but for now, I’m going to focus on finishing some books over the next couple of weeks and bringing that down to a manageable level again. I’ll talk more on coming Mondays about the goals and longer term plans around my books.
This week, Bryan (my husband) and I also started our youtube channel for audiobooks. He’s been narrating one of my fantasy series and we’re trying a new platform. It’s yet another avenue for revenue to come in for us and it gives readers who struggle to afford audio a way to listen and generate us some income at the same time. Early days there, but I don’t like leaving money on a table we could have.
I also set up a Patreon for the castle, since several folks asked for it, both here and on social media. I’ve set it up with a sort of pay what you want tier, only. You just select the $1 and change it to whatever you want to give monthly.
Because there isn’t a bunch of actual tiers, and I don’t really know how long this is going to take, what we’ve decided to do is keep track of lifetime Patreon amounts (thankfully Patreon give me a total for that really easily), and give people some rewards based on where they get to by the time we buy the building.
It still feels totally strange to me to have one, but it’s there and I am so so grateful that you want to help in this way. You can find it here.
All that said and linked to, there will never be any pressure to give and I really don’t want folks to get themselves into a bad financial situation or anything like that.
There are also loads of other ways to help me get there that don’t involve just donating money. You can tell people about this. Both this blog and recommending my books to people. You can go listen on our youtube channel, read the books on kindle unlimited, and I even have signed print copies and merch on my website if you have folks in your world who would appreciate those things as gifts. Links for both these are at the bottom of the page with those super cool icons.
I’m also very eager to learn about lots of different elements that go into getting to the castle and running successful retreats when we have it, so if you have advice or knowledge about anything like financial investing, retreat budgeting, hidden costs, or anything else I’ve not thought of, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
It also helps a lot to know you’re all there, reading, encouraging and hopefully being inspired too!
I’m going to blog again on Thursday and this time work out the big, what do we actually need, part of making a plan, so until then, as my adorable husband often says, keep being awesome folks, and thank you for being so amazingly encouraging so far!