Fellow authors—I’m talking to you. How is 2020 going to be different for you than all the years that preceded it? It’s not just a new year but the start of a new decade. Make that decade rollover a memorable one by making a major change or two in your writing career.

~ If you’ve written only fiction up till now, you could try your hand at nonfiction. Conversely, if you’ve written only nonfiction, you could try your hand at fiction.

~ A bit less radically, if you’re a fictioneer who’s written only romances, you could try your hand at mysteries. If you’ve written only westerns, how about trying to write sci-fi? If nonfiction is your area, and you’ve written only self-help books, how about a how-to? If you’ve written only parenting books, team up with a horticulturist or a landscaper and write a book on gardening.

~ You could team up with an artist to try creating manga.

~ Are you a poet? Why not try writing song lyrics and finding a composer to set them?

~ If you’re a playwright, try your hand at a TV pilot.

~ If you’re a novelist, how about developing one of your books as a movie script?

~ If you’ve written only short-form materials—articles, stories—try writing your first book.

Now, what if you haven’t ever written a book before? Or maybe you haven’t even written an article or short story? This is your year to start! Strike out and do it! Devote an hour a day to your writing, and soon enough you’ll have your work finished—and ready to submit to editors (or to self-publish).

Do you have a book manuscript that’s languished in your files or on your hard drive because six or eight publishers, or a large handful of agents rejected it and you gave up? Get it “out of mothballs” and go over it. See if it can be improved in any way. Then do one of these things:

~ If you’d submitted only to agents, consider submitting it to a smaller publisher that doesn’t require you go through an agent.

~ Consider self-publishing. It’s a sure way to get your book out there, and these days it’s very respectable. In fact, who knows what could happen—Fifty Shades of Grey started out as a self-published novel, was picked up by a traditional publisher, and became a runaway best seller!

Now, I’m not promising your book will be the next mega-best-seller or even that it will be picked up by a conventional publisher—but anything is possible!

So how is 2020 going to be different for you? Take a step forward. Make a change. Make something happen with your writing career, or make something different happen with your writing career. It’s time to grow!