Will this post help you with the business side of writing?

Despite my oh-so-limited time to spend on anything writing related, I am treating my writing as a business. I’ve had a business plan from the beginning. Not a professional, capture-venture-capital kind of business plan, but a comprehensive guide to my own efforts to be successful. It’s an ever-evolving document as I flesh out details.

This is the first in a series of posts about my business plan. Hope it helps!

My business plan currently has five sections: an overview/introduction, a production plan, an operations plan, a publicity plan, and a marking plan.

You might think the publicity and marketing could be bundled together, but for this marketing-weak-minded writer, separating them brings clarity.

For authors, publicity for your author brand can be distinct from the marketing necessary for your products.

1. Overview and Introduction

This covers a brief description of my business as a writer, what I want to accomplish, my audience (I’m cross-genre, so, yeah, I try to spell it out), competitors, and more. See more in a later article in this series.

2. Production Plan

This not only covers the products of my business — the novels, with some essay work — but also the process I follow to produce these works. It’s so much more than typing words into a word processor, then handing off to Amazon. And even after publishing, there’s work to do.

3. Operation Plan

This section answers such questions as website maintenance and review, how I operate the business, financial planning, how I operate in the world of social media, best practices, newsletters and campaigns, and the most mundane, record-keeping.

4. Publicity Plan

This covers my author platform (okay, writer’s platform, as I’m yet unpublished). What kind of platform? What kind of website? What social media platforms to target? What’s my strategy with my newsletter? How do I grow my platform when I need to? When do I need to do what?

5. Marketing Plan

This covers in greater depth my “4P” — product, price, promotion, and placement. It’s too simplistic to say the bulk of work happens just before launch; there’s work all through my product process. And, yes, it’s closely tied to my author brand and publicity for individual books. This is definitely my weakest area of the plan and personally.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2019 Cindy Rae Johnson