How to Make an Editorial Calendar

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It’s one of my favorite times of year. I looked forward to the New Year no matter what year I am leaving behind. I’m always excited for the possibilities in a new one.

 

Something new I’m trying this year is an editorial calendar. I’ve seen them done by some social media planner types. I'm intrigued.

 

So, this year I’m going to make one. A combination of my book schedules and my other writer life duties like blogging or social media.

 

I’m still ignoring social media, mostly. Having a tweet from years ago kill my career opportunities, uh no. If I learned nothing from Kevin Hart, this would be the take home. Shut your mouth, people. No one listens. Until they are panicking for saying they are Christian and being pummeled by LGBTQ groups for being deviant and evil. It’s exhausting. Plus, no one is happy. What’s the point?

 

I’m looking at my goals and ideas for 2021. I know I want to blog at least once a week. Why do I never make this work? Really simple. Topics. I sit down because I know I need to blog, and I can’t think of anything to say. I close my laptop and move on to the next thing.

 

What if I planned out what I wanted to post?

 

Yeah, I may be a smart cookie most of the time, but this revolutionized my thinking.

 

I’ve seen a couple of the YouTube peeps I follow have these plans for the videos they want to put up. They have a calendar for their channel. What days they post what kind of content. Mondays are murder, Tuesdays are Grab 5, Friday’s are art journal posts and so on and so forth.

 

Why did I need someone to tell me to do this? Geez.

 

I know I want four blog topics for the month. Plans at the moment in my perfect day kind of life have me posting blogs on Fridays. Whether you work on paper or digitally, this couldn’t be simpler. Write it down.

 

I’m looking at the month of January in my paper planner. There are five Fridays, but the first one is a holiday. Only four ideas. Do I want to set up some consistency? Should first Friday of the month be a writing book I enjoyed? Second Friday will be my fiction read of the month? On and on and so forth.

 

Writing down or typing out ideas and having a place to keep them all seems super easy and a no brainer. I’ve never done it for my community outreach. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but that’s what happens when you try something new.

 

Do you like paper? I bet you have a spare notebook lying around you could keep ideas in.

Digitally you could use the note app on your phone, notion, trello, google drive doc… There are so many options. Pick one that appeals and don’t overcomplicated it.

 

It doesn't take up too much time. Ten- or fifteen-minutes max. Turn to the calendar and write in January blog topics. Since I’m doing books, I wrote down a writing book, fiction book, best seller postmortem, what I read for fun.

 

You have a map of where you are going in January. When you are waiting for something to begin, a meeting, video doctor appointment and so forth, put that five or ten minutes to use writing a little of the blog post. You don’t need to plan out the time. Use what you are wasting. A couple of days of it, and you’ll have a blog to edit. I think you will actually be shocked by how this will come together.

 

Try it. Let me know how it goes.

 

Where are you fitting in your novel writing? That’s for Part Two next time.