Creating a Production Plan for the Year—Some Thoughts
By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
Happy 2015! Hope everyone enjoyed their holidays. I’m back into the swing of things and have been working on this year’s production plan for my books.
I’m not so much a fan of resolutions. I’d rather see my goals laid out on a to-do list or on a calendar as deadlines. That’s why I use a very simple production plan each year. If you’d like to do the same, here are my tips for getting started or for honing your list.
Keep the plan visible. I use the free Google calendar for my plan. That means that it’s on my phone, which, as a mom, is always on my person. My calendar is set up to email me my daily agenda. Not only will I have the item itself on the calendar (deadline for finishing mystery, e.g.), but I’ll also have the rest of the year’s deadlines in the event description so that I can always see the big picture. Not be overwhelmed by the big picture, though, because I know it’s all meted out on the calendar.
Output: First of all, I keep my yearly goal attainable. There’s nothing like setting the bar too high. So know yourself, know your output. If it’s completely reasonable to expect yourself to write a page a day, then set your goal for a finished book in 2015. If it’s reasonable to expect several pages a day, set it higher.
Know your abilities. Know what you want or need to outsource. I completely understand the desire to keep costs down for a self-published project. But it’s also important to know our limitations. Do we have a design background and can learn how to make great covers that will help sell our books? Great. But if we don’t, that research time might be better spent in finding a good cover designer. Which leads me to…
Know what you need to learn. If you need to research book designers or formatters (I do maintain a free list, if you need help getting started), or website design, or even research extensively for the book you’re writing…add those things onto your calendar. Break tasks into smaller steps to make them less intimidating.
Know your order of events for production. Mine runs like this: Contact book designer and have a date for a cover conference (this is first because my cover artist gets booked very quickly). Write book by X deadline. Write cover copy, in case the book designer conference date is prior to my completion of the book. Edit. Send book to beta reader while I’m editing. Make sure I’m on freelance editor’s calendar, if it’s a self-pub book. Edit using revision suggestions from beta and editor. Contact formatter and send him text file and cover files and book extras. Your order of events might need to be slightly different. Maybe it’s your editor who is hard to book and you need to reserve him or her before you even finish your first draft. Maybe you have several beta readers or you format your own copy.
Know what you want to do/have time to do for promo. I used to be on every platform there was (although I never really could get the hang of Tumblr…). Now I’ve realized that it’s best to limit myself to the platforms I enjoy most so that I’ll actually stay engaged. Whatever you want or feel you need to do for promo, stick it on your production schedule in manageable bites. This might be have a Goodreads giveaway or this might be send out a newsletter when book launches.
The production plan helps me in three ways. One, it reminds me that this is a business. I have a plan and I’m sticking to it as much as I can. Second, it keeps me from being completely overwhelmed by the upcoming year. Third, it keeps me from forgetting any part of the process…and believe me, I’ve forgotten parts before. If you forget, for instance, to contact your cover designer, your launch could be delayed by a month or more, if your designer stays booked.
The point of a production plan is definitely not to create more stress. This would be primarily for writers who feel the need to impose more order and possibly more personal accountability, into the process. It’s really to make the goals manageable and actionable by its simplicity. It has the added benefit of making us plan and figure out what we want from ourselves and our writing for the year.
Have you thought about your goals for 2015? Do you ever write up production plans?
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