Once again this blog has been recorded for your listening pleasure. Click here to download it to take it with you, or just click the start button to listen to right here.

We are continuing on with this series of New Year’s questions. Are you ready?

This week’s question is:

What is one thing you want to try in the new year?

You all already have experienced one thing I wanted to try in this new year—audio!

I really hope you are all enjoying listening to me read out my blog. I know I’m actually having a lot of fun recording it. So, hey, whether you say anything or not, I may just continue on recording my blog whenever I have the time. Maybe, if you get used to having it there, you’ll start listening to it—if you haven’t already. If you don’t, well… at least I’m having fun, right?

Along with my audio-ization of my blog, I’m also going to begin recording my books. It’s probably going to take me a while to record even one because I’m trying something completely different (and fun). Not only am I reading my books myself, but my husband is reading them with me. Yep! He’s got an amazing voice, so he’s going to read the male dialogue and pov and I’ll do the female.

Of course, he works full time so the only time we’ll have to work on this is on the weekends. He’s promised to read one chapter a week so… um… the first book we’re reading is A Hand for the Duke which has thirty-two chapters. We’re going to be reading this well into the fall!

Hopefully, he’ll keep with it that long. If not, I’ll have to start over from scratch reading it myself. So, some time by the end of this year, hopefully, I’ll have an audiobook. LOL!

The other thing I’m going to be trying in 2020 is something that most authors do—track the data on their book sales and see how well their marketing is working.

I am here to admit to the world that I’ve never done that.

Yes, I do keep track generally of my book sales, but I’ve never done a direct association of sales with promotions. Well, this year I’m going to do that.

I hate spreadsheets. I hate math. I hate trying to figure out if something was successful or profitable. I’m just really bad at all that—statistics!! Yuck! However, it’s what one has to do when they’re in business and I’ve just been shoving it aside and trying to get by without it. However, this year with my new marketing strategy, I really need to keep track of all the marketing I’m doing and seeing if it’s actually working.

By the way, it is pretty easy to tell without doing all the data analysis and tracking if marketing efforts are working. It’s easy to see if sales go up just when you know that an ad is running. But to properly track sales and correlate that to specific marketing strategies is a little more involved and that’s what I’m going to do my best to keep track of.

Of course, in order to do that, I need to have a really good spreadsheet, so as soon as I’m writing this blog post, I’ll open up Excel and get started designing that. Although to be perfectly honest, I am so tempted to pass that over to my son who does data analysis for a living. The only problem with letting him do it is that he’ll make it super-complicated. I’m sure it will be absolutely accurate, it’s just that I need it to be very easy for me to understand. If I design it myself, it probably won’t be the most efficient way of doing it, but at least I’ll understand it.

All right, people, over to you (because I know that you all are just waiting to get finished with reading or listening to this blog post so that you can write your comments below!). Tell me what you are going to do differently in 2020!