I’m a little late on the blogging goals band wagon, seeing as most bloggers posted their goals early this month, but better late than never.  One advantage of posting later is that I’ve had time to reflect on other peoples’ blogging goals and to see if I want to adopt some of them.  So what exactly are my blogging goals this year?

1.  Reach 1,000 followers.  (WordPress and email combined.)

I started out the year with 633 followers and at the time of writing this post I have 687 followers.  In 2013 I acquired 455 new followers so I’ll just have to stay on pace with my average of about a follower per day.  So why do I want 1,000 followers?  Why not 900 or some other high number?

Well, the answer is that on NetGalley most of the large publishers like Penguin are only accepting review requests from blogs with 1,000+ followers.  Some of my favourite books are published through Penguin, so by reaching the 1,000 follower milestone I’ll be able to request them.  It’s not guaranteed that I’ll be accepted, but with my really high reviews to requests accepted ratio it’s not going to hurt my chances.

2.  Publish one well-researched article per month.

I’m not talking about my rants here.  I’m talking about articles like The Portrayal of Cleopatra in Historical Fiction.  In other words, articles that take a little more research and a little more thought than rants do.  Besides, rants are spur-of-the-moment sorts of things and I rarely schedule them more than a couple of days ahead of time.  I want my research-intensive articles to be a little more thorough and I want to schedule them a couple of weeks in advance to give me more time to reflect on them as well as make corrections.

3.  Reach 650 reviews total.

Right now I’ve written 464 reviews, meaning I’ll have to read and review 186 more books, short stories and novellas this year.  That means I’ll be writing a little over 16 reviews per month, which is doable for me.  It’s about 4 reviews per week for the rest of the year, which is also quite doable.  I read a lot and review pretty much everything I read.  Besides, I like hitting big milestones like this.

I figure that if I reach my goal of 650 here in 2014 I can hit 800 in 2015 and (if I’m still around the blogosphere) reach 900 in 2016 and 1000 in 2017.  My review production is going to slow down in 2016 and 2017 due to general life stuff but I’m hoping to at least hit 1,000 reviews in total for The Mad Reviewer.  I don’t want to quit anytime soon, so I don’t have any plans for shutting down my blog for a long time yet.

4.  Control my review requests!

I will clear my waiting list.  No ifs, ands or buts.  There is no excuse for me to still have the books authors requested I review on my list here in 2014.  After I clear all of the pending requests, I will be initiating an open submission call for no more than a month, close down requests until I clear them again and then doing the same thing.  This will be far more manageable and I’ll also have a new form for authors to fill out so I can weed out those books that really don’t interest me.

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These are my blogging goals for 2014.  What are some of yours?  What do you think of mine?