December is here, a month filled with festive busyness, cozy family moments, and the darkest days of the year. With the Winter Solstice approaching on December 21, we’re in the season of long nights and brief days—perfect for taking a pause, looking back at your 2024 journey, and envisioning what you want to create in 2025. Even if New Year’s resolutions aren’t quite “your thing,” there’s something natural and powerful about marking the year’s end with reflection.
Why make time for reflection?
Because what we don’t pay attention to often slips by unnoticed, sometimes in ways that surprise us. Just as we might lose track of finances or daily habits if we don’t check in, overlooking our writing and author journeys can mean missing crucial insights. Reflection is where awareness and growth happen—it’s where we celebrate wins, learn from mistakes, and recalibrate for the future. I thought it would be fun to share the guide I use at this time of year in hopes you, too, will find it helpful in making the most of this reflective season:
1. Review Your 2024 Goals and Progress
- Take a look back at the goals you set for yourself and your book during 2024. What did you achieve? Which goals remained on the back burner, and what patterns kept them there?
- Identify what went well. Did certain strategies or platforms resonate with your audience? Did some angles or pitches hit the mark with the media more than others? It’s normal to have a yes response to this.
- Reflect on what didn’t go as planned and consider how you can reframe these as learning experiences. This isn’t about dwelling on missteps but about gathering insights that can inform your approach in the coming year.
2. Celebrate Your Accomplishments
We tend to focus on what’s left undone, particularly those perfectionists among us, but this is a time to honor what did get done. Acknowledge the hurdles you overcame, the skills you sharpened, and the milestones you reached. I am a huge fan of celebrating even the little wins. They give you momentum to accomplish much bigger things, so don’t be stingy with your own kudos.
- Did you finally get comfortable on social media, start a newsletter, build new media relationships, or add contacts to your email list? Did you take a class, speak from some stages, put yourself out there in a new way? Again, take a moment to recognize each achievement, big or small, and give yourself credit.
- If you launched your book this year, became good at delivering interviews, attended conferences and had your own book signings, or found your “tribe” of readers, these are fabulous victories worth celebrating!
3. Refine Your Yeses and Nos for 2025
- Reflect on the commitments you made this year. Were they in line with your goals, or did some pull you away from what mattered most? This is key. Go over your calendar and assess how you spent your time. The majority of your time should be spent on the top 3 things you want to accomplish. The bottom half of the list may need to become nos, or “it would be nice if…”
- Use these insights to be more intentional with what you say “yes” to in the New Year. Let go of any decisions that didn’t work out as “mistakes,” and see them instead as feedback. Learning when to say “no” and how to protect your time and focus can be transformative.
4. Use Your Year as a Map for the Future
- Look at your 2024 experience as a roadmap. Visualize how you want your journey to look by this time next year. Is it securing a certain number of media placements, continuing to build your email list, create more collaborations with others, or maybe even tackling writing a new book?
- Visualization is powerful—it sets a target for your mind and motivates you toward clear, specific outcomes. This year-end reflection is your opportunity to create that vision and use it as a guide for the year ahead.
- You can relax during this process. It should be easy and fun. And it should feel good. If you’re stressing in any way, you’re not doing it right.
5. Document It All
Our memories can be wonderfully selective, and without writing things down, we often lose track of important details or forget some things completely. Make a habit of recording your reflections, insights, and progress. Use this as your tool to look back and see the evolution of your journey as we move through the next year.
- Write down your accomplishments, the new skills you gained, the contacts you met, and even the challenges you faced. These notes will serve as both a record of how far you’ve come and a source of inspiration for the future.
Moving Forward
So, as we embrace the quiet, reflective season of December, take a little time to honor 2024—the wins, the lessons, and everything in between. This process of looking back is what fuels growth, helping you clarify what matters most as you step into 2025. Here’s to a season of insight, gratitude, reading, and the exciting possibilities that lie ahead!
To your success!
Joanne
P.S. Change is wonderful, and I hope this has sparked ideas about what you can transform with regard to your book’s publicity. But sometimes, the unchangeable is exactly what we need. And you can’t change that!
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