Just a plan
I love how one thing leads to another and mapping an idea where it came from.
As I almost always do on Friday mornings, I read through my favorite blogs for ideas of what to write my blog about this week. This morning there was (as there frequently is) a great blog on Anne R. Allen's site listing tricks every writer should know. A link there led me to Jami Gold’s Worksheets for authors (many of which are terrific and I highly recommend you check them out).
Among her worksheets was a business plan worksheet.
I’ve been toying with writing a business plan for a year (yes, a full year!), but I hadn’t found a less business-y, more author-ly way to put one together. Well, Jami Gold got me started.
I didn’t use her exact plan because it was still too business-y for me, but she got me moving in the right direction, so today I’d like to share with you what I came up with. Feel free to adapt this to something that would make the most sense for you and how you plan out your work.
The basic idea of a business plan is to plan out your goals for the year—what you want to accomplish, how you are going to do so, and how much it’s going to cost you. Some people also include what they expect to earn as they accomplish their goals.
In Gold’s business plan, she also includes a section on competition (what others are writing and how they’re able to be more successful than you). That section depresses me, first of all, and secondly, what works for one person may not work for another, so I left that out. Yes, I’m always looking to see what others are doing and adopting what makes sense for me, but I’m not terrific and breaking down what others do to compare it to what I do. Maybe that’s why I don’t sell as many books or have as big a fan-base, but this is what I’m comfortable with.
Basically, I plan on filling this business plan out in January, revising it in April and August to see how on track I am and how I need to change it (for instance, I may come up with a great idea for a book in May and feel that I need to write that instead of one of the ones I’ve got planned, or I may be invited to join in an anthology (as I was this summer) and so I push back my writing plan to write that short story instead, before returning to my original plan (now set back a month).
The point is that this is a living document. I’m not going to write it in January and then put it in a drawer until the following December to pull out and see how I did. This is something I’m going to amend and add to throughout the year. So take a look and see what you think. Is there anything here that you would add? Anything you’d get rid of? As always, I value your thoughts and insights!
