INTERVIEW - A Journal that supports you to reflect, plan and sparkle! 💫
A lovely gift to yourself... 💝
You are welcome to join the membership on a 14 day free trial over the holidays. My gift. Expires 31st December
GOOD MORNING! (For transparency, this is a pre-scheduled post)
You guys know I LOVE journals. I’ve made four myself.
This year I took the year off design as my book ‘How to Build a World Class Substack’ was a sparkling prism of a project and kept me pretty busy. You can buy it here.
That said, I have made all of you our ‘2025 Substack Planner’. It’s coming really soon and already out to my members.
📖
I invited one of our
members, to tell us more about the creation timeline of her fabulous Hello/ Goodbye Journal. She sent me a copy and I’m LOVING using it. I just LOVE this time of year for reflecting.Ok, over to Selina…
✨
Hi
, welcome to Sparkle on Substack I’d love to ask you MORE about your process with the journal… my first question is…Where did the idea for Goodbye/ Hello Journal come from
I created the first version of the Goodbye/Hello journal fourteen years ago and I created it for me.
In those days I lived my life in high speed, I played hard, worked hard and lived life forever facing forward, always looking towards the next goal, dream or adventure.
But as I approached the end of 2010, I felt a strong urge to stop for a moment, to pause in the rush of life and take a step back.
Before hurtling into another year I wanted to take the time to reflect back on the year I’d just been through - on all that I’d done, all that I’d achieved and the lessons I’d learnt along the way.
And instead of scribbling down a few New Year’s Resolutions on a whim on Jan 1st (that I’d have mostly forgotten about by the time we hit February), I wanted to take the time to really get clear on what I wanted the following year to be all about, to set an intention for that year and choose which dreams I wanted to go after.
And so I opened up a Word doc and I created a series of questions that would guide me through that process.
I loved the process so much that I shared it with some of my friends, family and clients and they seemed to love it too. For the next few years I started sharing it more and more and found that people were emailing back from all over the world saying what an impact it had made. A teacher out in Ohio even wrote to tell me she had done it with her high school students. 🥰
And it was having a really profound impact on me too. Taking the time to take a step back and make space at the end of each year to go through this process really started to help me create the life I wanted to be living.
And hearing how it was helping others go after their dreams and design lives they loved got me thinking…what if this exercise became a journal you could hold in your hands, that you could fill in each year. Imagine watching your collection of Goodbye, Hello journals growing over the years, keeping a precious record of the lessons you’d learnt and the dreams you’d gone after…and that was how the dream for these journals began.
I love that story and what’s your favourite thing about creating it?
I love the creative collaboration I get to enjoy every year with the designer to come up with the new colour scheme and design. Ruth Ridgeway did two of the designs and then Lou Desborough and they have both been an absolute joy to work with.
I enjoy seeing what I can do each year to improve the journal. Even since the first physical journal was launched in 2017, it has evolved, both in physical design and the content. You now get quarterly check-ins to keep you on track throughout the year and this year I’ve included for the first time a ‘Yearly Life Design Plan’ where you can sketch out your plans for the year onto one page and I’m excited to see how people like that.
And I enjoy the fact that every year between October and January I get to play a game of seeing how many journals I can sell, how far it can reach across the world and what press I can get for it. There is always such a lovely buzz around it and I look forward to it every year.
But above all I love the sense of community that has grown up around these journals. Right from the very beginning I’ve been blown away by the support and love people have had for this journal - even when it was just a Word document. I think people can sense when something has been created from the heart and so they respond with such loving support and appreciation, but also the journal really has made a difference to a lot of people’s lives. It has become a much-loved New Year ritual for people all over the world and that for me is priceless. I asked fans of the journal to leave reviews on Amazon when ‘Goodbye 2024, Hello 2025’ came out last month and the reviews absolutely blew me away.
It’s so lovely to get feedback isn’t it. Can you talk through your process of getting it to market?
It has been a long and winding journey, so maybe best I do a quick summary year on year:
2017: We launched the first journal, Goodbye 2017, Hello 2018, with a Kickstarter campaign. My business partner, Vicki Pavitt, took a leap of faith with me, and together, we self-published under our brand Project Love. We hit 150% of our target, sending over a thousand journals to 27 countries (Christmas-time post office queues were intense!).
2018: We released Goodbye 2018, Hello 2019 and got amazing press with the help of our PR friend Jo: a double-page spread in the Evening Standard and mentions in Grazia, Red, The Independent, and Psychologies.
We also, amazingly, got it on shelves at Oliver Bonas - turns out they are a fantastic champion of independent makers. However, we quickly learned most book shops, even independents, wouldn’t carry self-published journals without a main distributor.
2019: We signed with an independent publisher, which meant a smaller advance than self-publishing, but way less workload, no financial risk, and better distribution. Suddenly, people were spotting the journal in shops worldwide! As well as seeing on the shelves of Oliver Bonas again, we also got to see it stocked at the Tate Modern. The publisher also improved its quality with little design tweaks, like thicker paper, spot UV on the cover and fold-in cover flaps.
2020-2022: With the pandemic, the journal vanished from shelves, and all the press coverage came directly from us. While it was a relief having a publisher to handle printing and distribution, it was frustrating to see minimal effort to get it into stores or press, plus they were negotiating smaller advances each year which didn’t feel great.
I also published Burnt Out in 2021 and had another journal published, Goodbye 30s, Hello 40s, but came away from both those experiences feeling disillusioned with the publishing world.
2022: Vicki and I decided to close Project Love, and I carried on with the journal under Project You. Our publisher was bought by a major publishing house, and they offered me a two-book (or rather journal) deal—but by then, I was over it. I decided to go back to self-publishing the journal, running another Kickstarter to launch it. Goodbye Hello returned to Oliver Bonas online, and I got it featured in the Evening Standard and the Metro.
I used a fulfilment house in Newcastle to post all the journals (as I was going to Venezuela for Christmas) and Squarespace for orders. The Royal Mail strikes made it tricky, but we managed!
2023: I got the journal back into the Tate Modern (and it was even featured as a staff pick!) and back online at Oliver Bonas. I launched a Shopify store so that I could sell directly on Instagram and Facebook and shipped all UK orders myself (I learnt a lot but never again!). My friend in Germany handled European shipments, and I experimented with Amazon sales in the UK and US.
2024: Goodbye 2024, Hello 2025 launched on October 16th this year - available in the UK, USA, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and in fact anywhere where people can buy from Amazon.com - one customer just received her copy in Singapore that way.
It is back at the Tate 🥳 (I was too late to get it into Oliver Bonas) and while I’ve tried to find other ways to get the journal into shops in the UK and US, it’s not happened this year. So, my main experiment this year is with selling the journal on Amazon in the UK and the USA (I explained in a Substack post recently here why I’m doing that). And I’ve also got a gorgeous stop motion ad coming out soon created by the amazing Loveday Socials and I’m going to be experimenting with putting some ad spend on instagram and facebook to see how that goes.
This is my first Christmas on Substack and so far I have had incredible support here. The Goodbye Hello journal is loved by a lot of writers and with the generous spirit on this platform, people are really helping to spread the word about the journals amongst their readers.
My aim each year is to build on the last, always experimenting to learn what works and what doesn’t. I have ambitions to grow but there is no rush, so as long as I am growing and improving year on year, I’m happy.
I plan to keep publishing these journals for life and am already dreaming up plans for Goodbye, Hello’s 10-year anniversary in 2026!
Wow what a journey! I love how dedicated you’ve been to finding ways to make it work. Does it link with your Substack publication, if so how?
No, I chose to keep Project You as the name for my journals and chose another name for my Substack - Another Way with Selina Barker.
I like the idea of creating more journals under the name of Project You - first some more of my own and then in collaboration with other creatives, coaches, therapists and guides…let’s see!
Everyone go support
- she’s a 2024 featured publication! Last question, what are you hoping for in your creative life in 2025!Well, I haven’t filled out my ‘Goodbye 2024, Hello 2025’ journal yet so I don’t know! Honestly, often it’s only as I fill out my journal that my dreams for the following year really become clear.
But one creative project I feel pretty sure I want to commit to next year is a new journal called Time to Thrive which comes with an audio guide from me that teaches you how to manage your energy day to day and helps you create a personal toolkit to thriving.
After writing my book ‘Burnt Out’ I became really passionate about teaching people how to become masters at managing their energy and I love the idea of each of us creating our own personal toolkits that help us to do that. Plus I love the idea of creating a multi-media experience - physical journal + audio content.
Thank you Selina for sharing more of the process and letting up peak behind the curtain of your BIG dream too. I always find these interviews so inspiring so I hope you enjoyed it too. Selina will be around in the comments if you want to ask more questions or send her love for her sales journey
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 | A guest post by
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Thank you Claire for inviting me to do a guest post - I've been wanting to share my journal self-publishing journey and can't think of a better audience than the Sparkle on Substack one. I LOVE being a member of this amazing club, so it was such an honour to be asked to do a guest post. Thank you!
My Mum has already packed my copy in her suitcase and is hand delivering it from the UK to Aotearoa NZ in a few weeks! 📖 🥰