Goal setting. Quite like resolutions, easy to make and hard to keep. So — I’m asking for your help. Here are my goals for 2022.

• Double the size of my email list
• Triple my followers on Goodreads
• Reach 50 followers on BookBub.

Yes, these are modest goals. Baby steps if you will. But achievable with your help. How? If you are on BookBub or Goodreads, you can help by following me. When you receive an email or social media post you can share it with your friends.

Read on to learn why marketing is so hard for me. Writing is a form a therapy, and perhaps by sharing my weakness I can overcome it.

Marketing goals are difficult for me to keep because — I hate and fear marketing. These days that is a fatal flaw for authors, who need to market their own work no matter how large the publishing company that publishes their work.

I blame this reaction, a stomach clenching, nausea inducing response on two childhood experiences. No, I wasn’t beaten by marketing textbooks as a child. Worse, I had to join Junior Achievement. It was 7^th grade and we had to go door-to-door selling kid-wrapped bundles of road flares. And yes, we had bundled them ourselves as part of a program based on learning by doing. I learned that I hated going door to door asking people to buy useless stuff from me.

My next experience was with the Girl Scouts. You know where I’m going with this, those bloody cookies. This year you can order your cookies online and have them delivered by Doordash. Maybe the powers that be at the Girl Scouts realized how humiliating and dangerous it is having young girls going door to door. Out into the winter cold I went, knocking on neighbors’ doors and soliciting sales. Most bought cookies because I was the kid down the street, which amounts to a donation to the Girl Scouts, wrenched out of people through guilt.

The upshot? I learned that asking people to buy things I’m selling is humiliating and guilt inducing. But, I love the books I wrote and think they each bring something good to readers’ lives. The pandemic shut down book fairs leaving sales through online sites and the bookstores who gutted it out. There are upwards of a million books published each year. Competition for eyeballs and shelf space is phenomenal. If you’ve hung with me to this part, you understand why my marketing goals seem modest. But each year I’ll keep the same goal and that will give me a direct path to book buyers interested in my stories.

I’d love it if you sent me an email or commented on this post with where you get ideas for new books to read and what type of books you enjoy. It will help me, and I might be able to recommend a new book for you.

Thanks friends!

Linda (aka L. G. Reed)

Lindareed939@lindareed939