The answer is “It depends on the writer.” I know writers who freeze up at the mere thought of a deadline, and writers who can’t seem to write anything without one.

It also depends on what else is going on in the writer’s life at the time. A writer who is under a lot of pressure in other areas of her life (unexpected illness, serious financial problems, a death in the family, etc.) may suddenly find that having a deadline is one thing too many to handle, even though it’s never been a problem in the past. I’ve also known writers for whom the existence of a deadline was the only thing that kept them going during times of illness, financial crisis, etc. Mileage varies.

So first comes the old “know thyself” part. Which sort of writer are you?

If you can’t write (or can’t write much or steadily) without a deadline, and you don’t yet have one, you’ll have to figure out some way to persuade your backbrain that you have to get Chapter Three finished by next Saturday. Some folks take writing classes because it gives them a time and place at which they have to have some amount written. Others join writing groups for the same reason (though for this to work, the writer has to really take it seriously, and I’ve seen too many crit groups where 80 to 90% of the participants just didn’t have anything at all for any given session, which makes it hard to take it seriously as a deadline). Still others make a solemn promise to someone that they’ll see pages every Sunday, with the recipient given the right to impose penalties. (I know one writer who missed this sort of deadline and was forced to buy the recipient a hot fudge sundae…and watch her eat it.)

The more common problem, though, seems to be people who freeze in the face of a deadline.

If you’re this kind of person, the first thing I recommend is that you stop for a few minutes and think about why this happens to you. And be brutally honest. At least half the people I meet who have this “problem” only have it with their writing…they don’t freeze up when faced with a deadline at the office, and when they had papers due in college, they just buckled down and did them (OK, sometimes at 4 a.m. the day they were due, but still).

For folks like this, the problem is not so much the deadline as it is the fact that it’s a fiction writing deadline, which says to me that a good part of the difficulty is in the way they think about writing fiction – as something scary and special and not subject to the normal rules of work. Fixing this is a matter of attitude adjustment, which is never easy and which may involve lots of poking around in your childhood and your backbrain in order to figure out what you really think, why you have these reactions, and how to change them to something more productive.

But that still leaves the other half of people who have problems meeting deadlines. There’s still a lot of variation in this group: some people are convinced that no one can be creative writing to deadline (this is not true; many people can. The question is whether this particular writer is one of them or not); some chronically underestimate how long it’s going to take them to write ten pages (or how many pages it will take to cover X amount of material); some simply have bad time management skills; some procrastinate out of habit; and some go into such a panic at the thought of missing a deadline that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – their brains start running around in circles and screaming about the deadline instead of making up the stuff that will allow them to actually meet the deadline.

Again, diagnosis is key. If you’re having trouble meeting the deadline because it is One Thing Too Many on top of your child’s cancer, dealing with your soon-to-be-ex-husband’s lawyer, taking care of your elderly parent, and worrying about layoffs at your job, what you do will be very different from what you’d choose if the problem is habitual procrastination or underestimating how long it’ll take to get ten pages done.

Once you know why you’re having problems meeting deadlines, most of the solutions are common sense. There are a gazillion books on time management and beating procrastination out there; if one of those is your problem, it’s fairly easy to figure out what to do. (Actually doing it is another story, but no one can really help you with that part.) If it’s lack of discipline (or butt-in-chair time), the solution is likewise both obvious and not something anyone else can help with.

If you’re one of the folks who panics and/or freezes…well, if your brain and/or your backbrain is busy worrying or panicking about when something is due, it doesn’t have a lot of room left for actual work. Basically, you have to find some way to take the pressure off. In extreme cases, this may mean writing everything on spec (you aren’t required to sell on portion-and-outline after you’ve started publishing professionally, and of course if you haven’t sold anything yet, you pretty much have to work this way, as I don’t know any publishers who buy uncompleted first novels).

In less extreme cases, negotiating a deadline that’s much longer than you need can help; so can an understanding editor, agent, and/or spouse/partner. The main thing that seems to work, though, is forgetting about the deadline and refocusing on getting the writing done. For some, this means putting the deadline out of their minds and logging lots of concentrated time writing on a regular basis. Having a writing buddy to check in with (or to go for a “writing date” with – one of my friends and I have taken to hauling our laptops to a café once a week to spend an hour or two working) can help. If you’re of a more methodical/analytical mind, figuring out how many words-per-day you have to write to meet deadline and then making sure you meet that minimum every single day can work, as long as you only think about today’s word count and not that looming, panic-inducing deadline.

And of course, asking other writers for their methods of beating deadline-anxiety can be useful, as long as you don’t take any of them for the One True Method. Every writer develops his/her own tricks as they need them. These are some of mine; do, please, contribute your own in the comments, if you like.

“Having been tragically orphaned at the age of ten, Dorothy Gale has been sent to live with her only relatives on a farm in Kansas. She has great difficulty in adjusting to her new life, and to her dour new guardians. As her aunt and uncle have no children and the farm is miles from the nearest house, Dorothy is lonely and friendless, a situation that will be familiar and appeal to many of the children who are the intended readers of this book.

A year after arriving at the farm, a freak storm separates Dorothy from her aunt and uncle and she has to make her way back to the farm on her own through many strange and startling adventures. My nieces love this book and it is their favorite bedtime reading. My wife and her book club think it would make a great movie! I’m sure you’ll want to see the manuscript and find out just how Dorothy gets home again!”

The book in question is “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” and all of the problems with it are ones I’ve seen multiple times in real-life query letters: spending the first paragraph on backstory that is not even mentioned anywhere in the book (I made almost all of the details up); leaving out all the specifics the editor would really want to know about the actual book (Oz, the wicked witches, the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion, etc.); offering the opinions of relatives; attempting to tease the editor into finding out “just how Dorothy gets home.” This query makes the book sound like a modern “problem novel” about grief and adjusting to a new situation; the “freak storm” sounds as if it’s the beginning of the climax of the book, instead of happening on page 4 (which is where it is in my copy).

A somewhat different wrongheaded query letter might look like this:

“It’s the middle of the Napleonic Wars, and the British army is raising militia to combat a possible invasion. One such regiment is quartered in the sleepy village of Meryton, where officer George Wickham makes the acquaintance of the Bennet sisters. Both Elizabeth and Lydia are drawn to him, but it is Lydia who follows when the regiment is moved to Brighton. While older sisters Elizabeth and Jane struggle with their own romantic problems back home, Lydia and George must choose between duty and their hearts, and more lives than their own will be affected by their decision.”

The problem with this query is, again, what it leaves out. None of the facts in it are wrong; they’re all in the book. It’s just really misleading – it makes “Pride and Prejudice” sound as if it’s focused on the military angle, with George Wickham as the main character. And it’s being coy about the ending again, but since the whole “plot summary” is about a subplot, it hardly matters. You could actually get a decent novel out of this summary, but it wouldn’t be the one Jane Austen wrote.

What you want in a query is specifics:

“When a cyclone carries Dorothy off to the magical Land of Oz, her one desire is to return home. On the advice of a good witch, she embarks on a journey to the Emerald City to find the wizard who may be powerful enough to send her back to Kansas. Along the way, she rescues a Scarecrow and a Tin Woodman, befriends the Cowardly Lion, is attacked by wolves, and barely escapes from a deadly field of poppies.

Finding the wizard sends Dorothy and her friends on a new quest – to retrieve the broom of the powerful Wicked Witch of the West. Even when she is captured, Dorothy remains determined. In the end, she defeats the witch and returns triumphant to the wizard, only to discover that he is a fraud. Dorothy must embark on a third journey, to find the good witch who can tell her the secret of the magic slippers that will take her home to her aunt and uncle at last.

This is not, perhaps, the very best possible example of a story summary suitable for a query letter, but I’m a novelist – if I could say it in less than 100,000 words, I wouldn’t have written the book in the first place. For those of you who want more examples (and a different set of eyes), I refer you to Miss Snark’s blog posts on cover letters. (Miss Snark is, alas, no longer posting.)

Oh, and one other basic principle of query letter story summaries: boiling down fifty or a hundred thousand words or more into two paragraphs is going to sound stupid and thin no matter what you do. Accept it. Your query letter isn’t competing against other people’s rich, deep, fascinating novels; it’s competing against other query letters. All of which also have to boil their rich, deep, fascinating novels down to two or three stupid paragraphs. So don’t worry about it.

Anyway, the first thing I’m going to say is that I am explicitly talking here about queries for NOVELS. You do not query for short stories; short fiction is a quick enough read that it’s as much work for the editor to answer a query letter as it is for her to read a submission, and reading the submission on the first go-around means the editor doesn’t have to deal with it twice, so that’s what they prefer.

The second thing is that a cover letter is not a query letter. If you’re submitting a manuscript, whether it’s short or long, the cover letter should basically say “Dear Editor: Here is my story of XXX,XXX words. I hope you like it. If you don’t want to buy it, here is a SASE. Yours truly, The Author.” You can fiddle with the phrasing, and if you have relevant credentials you can put in a line or two about them (but not a four-inch list of semi-prozines or every creative writing class you ever took), but that’s basically it.

A cover letter does not include a story synopsis. It does not need one; the actual story is attached. It also does not include warnings about your lawyer or rave reviews from your friends and relatives (unless one of your friends/relatives is somebody like Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, or the owner of the publishing company). This ought to be obvious, but from the rant I heard last weekend from an editor, apparently it is a much more obscure and difficult concept than I thought.

Query letters are just that: a one-page letter containing a summary of your story and any other relevant information that you send to editors/agents in hopes that one of them will ask to see the manuscript. Query letters also should not contain warnings about your lawyer or rave reviews from friends, though they do generally contain a paragraph or two of story summary.

A query letter is a sales document. This is where most of the people who have trouble with query letters get off on the wrong foot. The first common problem is that the author does not think of the query as a sales document at all, or does not think much about what that actually means. Instead of telling the editor the things the editor needs to know, he/she talks about what he/she found exciting about writing the book.

Sometimes, this is fine – if you’ve written an action-adventure, and what got you interested and excited and happy about writing it was the exciting face-off at the end between Darth Vader and Dr. Demento, describing what you’re excited about is exactly what you want to do. If, however, what got you interested was the really neat backstory and/or worldbuilding that you did, or the nifty looped-and-braided structure you came up with…well, this is the equivalent of going up to someone who has a bad headache and saying “I have these really pretty red pills – they’re cubes, very unusual, and you just don’t get this nice shiny red color in pills” when what the person you’re talking to wants to know is, “Will they get rid of my headache and how fast?”

The other really common mistake would-be authors make is to make the query letter sound like the back blurb on a book. This is understandable: the goal of both the query letter and the back blurb is to get someone to read the book, right?

Not quite. The goal of a back blurb is to get the reader to buy the book for himself, so that the reader can spend an enjoyable couple of hours reading it. The editor isn’t going to be reading the ms. for personal enjoyment. What the editor wants to know is not “Is this something I might enjoy reading, to the tune of seven or eight bucks?” but “Does this look enough like something other people will buy from my company that I’m willing to spend my precious time evaluating it?”

You can have written the greatest domestic comedy-of-manners since Jane Austen, and it won’t sell if you send it to a line of action-adventure novels. You can, of course, write a query letter that makes your domestic comedy-of-manners sound like a clone of The Hunt for Red October, but as soon as the acquiring editor gets a look at the actual manuscript, she’ll bounce it.

Therefore, the first principle of writing query letters is that the summary you give needs to reflect the actual book you have written. Also, notice that I keep saying “story summary” rather than “plot summary.” A good many writers see “plot” and automatically think “action plot,” even if the central, A-level plot is a political, intellectual, or emotional one. They end up describing the “B-level” kidnappings and car chases, which are really maybe 10% of the story and not the center of the book, because that’s “the plot,” when the story is about two brothers trying to reconnect after not seeing each other for twenty years.

A corollary of this is to start where the book starts and end where it ends. If the protagonist is a starship captain with an interesting background, you don’t start the query with two paragraphs about the interesting background that all happened before Chapter One, nor do you waste valuable words explaining how many children the protagonist has after the book ends, nor describing their adventures that might make great sequels when/if you get them written.

The second principle is to be as specific as possible (given that you have, at most, two or three paragraphs to fit everything into). “After many adventures” is not specific. “After being kidnapped, taming a dragon, and rediscovering the Library of Alexandria, among other things” contains specifics without going into so much detail that the mid-book adventures crowd out the other important stuff. Do not be coy. “In a shocking twist, Joe Hero must face his greatest fear to overcome his nemesis” is neither shocking, nor specific, nor even interesting…and could apply to about 9 million slush pile manuscripts, all but about three of which aren’t worth the editor’s time. The synopsis should describe your specific book, clearly enough that the editor can tell that it isn’t one of those other nine million.

Boiling 90,000 to 150,000 or more words down into two or three paragraphs is, of course, hard. Next post, I’m going to provide some examples, so you can see how it works.

And if you’re making money from your writing, and you have to pay U.S. income taxes, you need to be aware of this. You may not owe estimated taxes, but if you do owe them and don’t pay them, you’ll end up with an estimated tax penalty on top of the taxes you already owe.

The U.S. government requires everyone to make income tax payments that total to the lesser of: 90% of your current year’s tax liability, OR 100% of your last year’s tax liability. More on this in a minute.

If all you have is a normal day job, these payments are withheld from your paycheck and you don’t have to worry about them. If you are totally self-employed, you have to make estimated tax payments. If you have both writing income and a normal day job, you have a choice: you can have more withheld from your regular paycheck, or you can make estimated tax payments to cover your writing income. The catch is that a) figuring out how much more to withhold can be tricky because of FICA (see below) and b) you have to keep a close eye on your writing income and adjust the withholding at your day job if you don’t want to over- or under-pay, and this tends to be a nuisance and make employers unhappy about the extra paperwork after a while.

Estimated tax payments are due unevenly, on April 15, June 15, September 15, and January 15 (for the prior year). There are three philosophies about estimated taxes. The first holds that it is better/cheaper to keep careful track of your current year’s income and make sure to pay 90% of the taxes you expect to owe, even if it means you have to adjust the payments in the middle of the year because you have a sudden influx of income. People who go this route need to keep careful records, so that if the IRS asks why you delayed payment of half your taxes until the fourth quarter, you can prove that it was because you got a ginormous advance payment in December – i.e., you didn’t have that income until the fourth quarter.

The second idea is that tracking and predicting income so carefully is too much trouble, so it’s better to pay 100% of last year’s income taxes in four equal payments. Sure, this means that some years you’ll overpay and others you’ll underpay, but it will probably even out…and it’s an easy, certain way to be positive that you aren’t going to face any nasty surprise penalties at the end of the year.

The third is that it depends: if you have a big drop or a big rise in income, you go for the “90% of actual taxes owed this year”; if your income is pretty much the same, you calculate your estimated tax payments based on the “100% of last year’s taxes” figure.

Note that “current year’s tax liability” for purposes of estimated taxes includes FICA (Social Security) withholding as well as income tax withholding. As a self-employed person, you owe both the employee half of FICA withholding (7.65%) and the employer half (7.65%), for a total of 15.3% right off the top. Whichever way you choose to calculate, do not forget about this.

Also note that the IRS does not care whether you take your advance in copies, or whether you sell copies and use that money to buy more copies. As far as they’re concerned, it’s all income (and if you’re selling copies straight to readers, you probably owe state income tax, too. And sales tax, for which you need a sales license.)

If you’re right at the start of your writing career, have a day job, and get minimal income from writing (say, a few hundred bucks from short story sales over the course of a year), the easiest route is probably to adjust your withholding at your day job. Eventually, you’ll want to switch to estimated tax payments. In my own case, my first sale was a novel, which meant I got an advance, which was a big enough bump that I made estimated tax payments right from the start.

Deciding which way to handle the taxes on your writing income is more a matter of situation, personal temperament, and budgeting skills as it is of picking a “right” way. If you know that keeping tabs on your writing income and adjusting your estimates will drive you absolutely crazy, go for the “100% of last year” method. If you make a huge sale in the first quarter, and you know yourself well enough to know that you are going to be VERY unhappy if you have to pay all the taxes on it come the following April 15, make estimated payments that are more than 100% of last year. If the huge sale was last year, and this year your writing income will be half what it was then and you don’t have money sitting around, use the “90% of this year’s actual taxes” to figure out your estimated payments. You don’t have to pick one method and stick to it forever.

From a cash flow standpoint, the first two estimated tax payments (April 15 and June 15) are usually the hardest: April, because it comes at the same time as your annual tax payments (though it’s not so bad if you’re getting a refund that you can apply), and June because it’s a mere two months later, not a full quarter.

Taxes, including estimated taxes, are one area that is sufficiently important, sufficiently tricky, and sufficiently changeable that I recommend finding a good accountant sooner rather than later. Keeping up with the changes in the tax code is a full-time job, and I already have one of those. Exactly when you head to an accountant is up to you; if you’re only making $329/year in short story sales, it’s probably not worth it; if you have $50,000 in advance money coming in this year, it’s long past time.

In any case, this is the retirement-for-writers post. The very first question is: what does retirement mean to you, as a writer? Writing isn’t quite the same as other jobs; most of us can’t imagine retiring in the traditional sense (leaving a day job and not doing it any more). Writers also have more of an option to continue working than people in normal jobs – as long as our brains and our fingers continue to work properly, so can we. I’ve known a good many older professional writers who’ve worked into their eighties, right up to the last minute.

So what does “being retired” mean for a writer?

For me, the main thing it means is having a choice. The majority of professional writers have historically worked on portion-and-outline, meaning that we write an outline and 50-100 pages of a book, sell it, then have to write the rest to a deadline set in the contract. At some point, this gets more than a little old. “Being retired,” for most of the writers I know, means not having to work to deadline – being able to write what we want, when we want, and then sell it. Some still choose to sell on portion-and-outline, but even then, having a choice makes a difference.

Choice also means the ability to experiment more – to write in other genres, for instance, without needing to consider the potential financial downside of trying to build a whole new readership. It means not needing to feel guilty for skipping one’s writing time for a few days in a row. It means being able to slack off on some (though not all) of the less enjoyable tasks involved in running a business (the ones I’ve been droning on about for eight or nine posts now).

In order to have those choices, a writer, like everyone else, needs retirement savings. How much you need will depend on the lifestyle to which you would like to become accustomed and on how you have managed (and will continue to manage) your writing career. Because there are so many different paths for a writing career to take, planning for retirement has to be a bit more active than for most people.

On the one hand, writing income is irregular, which means Social Security payments (which are based on average annual income) may not be as large as you might have expected (that’s assuming you think that there will still be Social Security payments by the time you retire, whenever that is). On the other hand, if you have managed your writing so as to generate royalty income and keep your backlist available and productive (as opposed to concentrating on big money advances), your existing work can continue to generate income for a long time even if you aren’t putting out anything new.

What this means is that your preference for your career changes how you handle your retirement planning. If you’ve been getting irregular big-money advances and not worrying so much about your books earning out or about the backlist, then your income will drop as soon as you stop writing (or slow down significantly, so you’ll probably need to sock a fair chunk of the big money away for later (and you’ll want to, too, because there are tax benefits to shoving money into your retirement plan). You’ll also want to keep an eye on how much Social Security thinks it’s going to pay out when you start getting it. As with most people, you want enough of a retirement-fund-plus-Social-Security to live on; there are plenty of financial counselors and online web sites to help you figure out what that will be. On the plus side, if you’re not writing new stuff and don’t need to manage the backlist, you’re pretty much done with your writing business.

If you’ve managed your career with a vast quantity of work-for-hire or low-to-medium advance originals that come and go and never come back again, you’re in the same shape as the big-money advances people, except that your annual income is likely to be more regular and therefore your Social Security payments will be larger and you may not need to sock away quite as much in your retirement plan. Once you stop writing, you’re done with the business.

If your books are the sort that earn out their advances and continue to sell for a long time, or that can be re-sold after the first publisher loses interest, you likely won’t need quite as large a bundle in your retirement savings because your backlist will continue to bring in income. However, you will need to continue managing your backlist, making sure that things stay in print and get resold and reissued over and over. In other words, you have to keep running the business to some extent, even if you aren’t writing anything new.

And if you absolutely intend to keep writing at full speed until the day you drop, you still need a cash cushion, albeit a smaller one, to deal with everything from medical emergencies to unanticipated changes in the writing market that affect your ability to generate adequate income. The older you get, the greater the likelihood that you will lose a year or two of writing time to illness or unexpected surgery. Medicare and health insurance may pay your doctor and hospital bills, but they won’t replace the income you lose…and illness is a huge drain on one’s creativity.

How much you sock away into a retirement plan under each of these circumstances depends on how much you make and how much you want to be able to spend once you decide to declare yourself retired. The calculation is pretty straightforward: you decide how much income-per-year you want to have, figure out how many years you expect to live after you retire, and plug the numbers into one of the many retirement-planning calculators online (be sure you pick one that adjusts for inflation and that has a reasonable rate of expected return on your investments).

Once you have determined what you think you need in your retirement account, it is wise to consider it a minimum, not your whole goal. The more money you have in the bank (or investment account), the more options you have. Options are good.

As a self-employed person, there are several kinds of tax-advantaged retirement accounts that you can use to accumulate your savings: a traditional IRA, a Roth IRA, a SEP (Simplified Employee Pension), a solo 401K, etc. You probably want to educate yourself about these and then consult with your accountant or a financial planner, because they all have different rules, advantages, and disadvantages. Or you can ignore the tax benefits of these and just stick money in a bank or a normal investment account, but seriously, you’ll be far better off going with one of the tax-deferred plans that works for you. Myself, I have a Roth IRA, an SEP, and a normal investment account, and I max out my contributions to the first two every year and try to add to the third as well.

The main trick to retirement savings is to start early. The power of compound interest is amazing. When I was in B-school, they made us do the actual calculations, comparing the amount of money at retirement generated by two strategies: one person who put $2000 in an IRA starting at age 20, but who stopped at age 30; and one person who did the same thing, only starting at age 30 and going on for the next 30 years. The one who only saved for 10 years, but who started early, always came out significantly ahead of the one who got a late clue. In other words, the sooner you start, the less you are likely to have to contribute out-of-pocket over the years.

If you are a professional writer – or hope to be one – you are running a small business. It’s kind of a peculiar small business, but it’s still a business. Even if the main thing you are interested in is the Art of writing, the business aspects deserve careful consideration and attention, because they affect both the time and energy you have for creating your work (if you’re spending twelve hours a day putting out fires because you neglected one area or another, there’s not much time or energy left for writing). How you manage your business also affects the availability and distribution of your finished work. This doesn’t matter much if you want to sell 100 copies to your family and friends, but it makes a big difference if you’re hoping to make a living at this.

If you’re just getting started, or have yet to sell, most of your time will be doing Production (writing), Quality Control (editing and revising), Sales and Marketing (researching publishers and sending the ms. out), and Administration (tracking your submissions). Finance will kick in as soon as you have either income or expenses to track; Publicity usually shows up a few years down the road.

Midlist writers tend to be juggling a lot faster, as they typically have several projects somewhere in the pipeline, meaning that they may be in the process of writing one book (Production), editing another (QC), while a third is just hitting the bookstores and needs a Marketing or Publicity push; two backlist titles are going up as e-books and those files need reviewing (more QC and Admin); meanwhile, Croatian subrights on half the backlist have sold and need to be tracked until the checks arrive (Admin and Finance), and maybe the writer should see if his/her agent can get them interested in the other half (Admin and Marketing); and an unexpected opportunity to edit an anthology has come up, which could take the writing career in a whole new direction and which the publisher needs a Yes or No on by the end of the month (Executive/strategy). And of course, writers who’ve achieved “lead title” or bestseller status have even more complications in all areas.

In other words, the farther along your career you get, the more work has to be done in each of the business areas, and the more complex that work becomes. This means that no matter what sort of planning you do in regard to your writing business, you’ll probably need to revisit it periodically and make adjustments according to where you currently are in your business, what the market is doing, and how your goals, skills, resources, and opportunities have changed.

As I said to begin with, most writers don’t have a formal business plan. This is because most formal business plans are designed for small businesses that are trying to get a loan from a bank, or for giant corporations that are trying to project their future business. They’re heavy on the financial stuff – sales projections, breakeven analysis, three-year projected P&L, and so on. That doesn’t work particularly well for writers because a) they’re hardly ever going to need a loan to support the business, and b) the time-line for developing a writing business is usually a lot longer than three years, which makes financial projections really difficult unless you have several contracts already in-hand.

For writers, planning the business is about managing their own resources (time, money, energy) in order to have their writing job/career/business go in whatever way they want it to. This obviously means that you have to start by figuring out which way you want things to go. Are you looking for the validation of professionally publishing a few stories? Are you hoping to make a living? Will you be happy writing one gigantic forty-volume popular series about the same people and places, or do you want to do something different with every book? Would you be happy doing some high-paying ghostwriting or working under several pseudonyms, or do you want all your work to be your original stuff with your name on it? What does “being a writer” mean to you?

Once you’ve done that, think about what you are willing and able to do to get there. I’ve talked to folks who weren’t willing to give up one hour of television per week in order to work at their writing, yet who were supposedly desperate to become bestselling writers. You can’t run a decent hobby business on one hour per week, let alone a bestselling writing business. Be honest with yourself about what you want, how much time and energy you’re willing to put into getting it, and how well those two things match up.

Also think about the kind of time and energy you are willing to put into each of the seven business areas, which ones you think you’re good at (or can be), and which ones you’re pretty sure you’ll hate. Then think a bit about how best to design your career in order to minimize the need to do stuff you hate, and get maximum benefit out of the stuff you like doing and/or are good at. (Hint: if you hate doing the Production part of Operations, i.e., the writing itself, this is probably not the career for you.)

What I’ve tried to do in this series of posts is a quick-and-dirty top-down overview of the business of writing, which I hope will be of use to people no matter what stage of their writing career they’re at. I may, at some future date, try to get into more specific practicalities in some of these areas, but probably not until after I’m done with my taxes (it’s too much like a busman’s holiday otherwise. Though I am going to add an extra post on retiring next, because people asked for it.)

Writing is a job, a career, and a business, as well as an art. If you don’t think about the business end before you actually start selling, you’ll have to play catch-up later…and the longer you wait, the harder it gets to figure it all out.

A final caution: Always keep in mind that there are only two line areas: Operations and Sales/Marketing. The Executive area, under which “making a business plan” falls, is not one of these. In other words, thinking about how you’re going to handle all this is worthwhile, even necessary, but it won’t do you any good at all unless you a) have a product (a manuscript, story, or book) to sell and b) can sell what you’ve produced. The first thing is always, always the writing: doing it and improving it and getting it out in front of editors and/or readers.

7. Executive – This has to do with strategic planning and overseeing everything else.

 For writers, the Executive area means keeping an eye on all the other categories to make sure nothing is left out and everything stays in balance (which can be quite a trick for a one-person business). This is also where long-range forward planning goes, which is a whole set of choices that usually get lumped under “managing your writing career.”

Exactly what is an Executive decision and what falls into one of the other areas of business is a slippery thing to determine – and generally unnecessary, as well. As long as you decide whether to let the publisher have e-book rights or whether to hang on to them and published the e-books yourself, it doesn’t matter whether you call it Operations, Finance, or Executive. The important thing is that the decision gets made.

Larger decisions fall squarely within the Executive category, especially those ”managing your career” decisions. There are a lot more options than many would-be writers think of, ranging from basic and fairly obvious decisions (self-publish or traditional publishing? Large, regional, small, or micro-press? E-books or paper? Short stories or novels?), to things that affect specific areas like Finance (go for the highest possible advance, or trade high advances for a better royalty rate, or even a royalties-only deal?) or Publicity (focus mainly on online, or offline? Push early and often, or wait until there are more books to push?), to career development (strictly original fiction, or work-for-hire? Under your name, a pseudonym, or multiple pseudonyms? In one genre or several? Working with other writers, packagers, etc., working solo, or some combination as opportunities arise?).

All these decisions can and do get revisited periodically, and sometimes they change as circumstances change. You may decide initially that you’re going to stick strictly to novels, and five years later unexpectedly get asked to participate in a prestigious short-story anthology with some of the most prominent writers in your field. You might still end up turning the opportunity down, but I guarantee you’ll want to think really hard about it first.

This is also where I’d put managing the backlist, which is a key element in making a living for any writer who’s been at it for a while. Your backlist is all of your older titles; it of course includes the stuff that’s out of print, but it also includes stuff that’s been in print for a couple of years, and maybe even some of those “trunk stories” that never sold at all. Older titles can be resold to new publishers once they go out of print; if you and/or your agent put some elbow grease into it, subrights like audiobooks and foreign translations can provide a surprising amount of income. And then there are e-books and print-on-demand, which have opened up a lot of options for the backlist…but again, you need to put some effort into getting things out there and maintaining them.

One of the most important aspects of the Executive area is keeping everything else in balance – making sure that Publicity isn’t taking over the time that needs to be spend on production/Operations, that the Finance and Administration paperwork is kept up to date, that Sales is covering the backlist as well as the current work, etc. This is especially tricky because in writing, all of this stuff comes in waves: Finance is pretty dead for most of the year, bar an hour or two a month for record-keeping, but it suddenly becomes a critical activity in April when taxes are due. Quality Control has a big surge right before a new book comes out (with the copyedit and galleys to go over); Publicity and Marketing usually have their surge right after. And so on.  So you can’t assign X hours per week to each area, week in and week out. You have to put a lot of hours into whatever is “hot” at the moment, while keeping an eye out to make sure the stuff that isn’t currently swamping you gets enough attention that it won’t blow up into some other kind of crisis.

Long-range planning is a major component of the Executive area. What do you want your eventual writing career to look like? Some writers make as much or more from giving workshops, speaking engagements, writer-in-residence gigs, and teaching as they do from the books they write; others make their money cranking out titles in multiple genres under multiple pseudonyms; still others work in multiple areas, writing screenplays or comics or RPG scenarios as well as short stories and novels; some stick to one much-loved series or set of characters; and so on.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all way of managing your career, because there are many different possible goals and many different paths to reaching each one. Also, no two writers I know have ever been faced with the exact same set of opportunities and challenges coming out of the blue, nor have they made the exact same set of choices when faced with similar opportunities.

In the past thirty years, I’ve accepted or turned down various opportunities ranging from editing anthologies, to writing a work-for-hire, to helping a friend launch a small press, to teaching classes in writing, to writing a book specifically for a packager or a new line being developed by a friend/editor. Sometimes, my friends and colleagues thought I was crazy to take the risk I took; sometimes, they thought I was crazy for not taking advantage of whatever it was. At present, I don’t regret any of the choices I’ve made; I think that’s because I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do in the long run, and where I wanted to end up and why (if not always how to get there).

Another major component of the Executive area is keeping an eye on what the market is doing, and educating yourself about what it has done in the past and what possible directions it may be going in the future. Over my career, there’s been a major, market-changing event about every ten years – the Thor Power Tool tax decision in the 1980s, the collapse of the independent distributors in the 1990s, the explosion in e-books in the 2000s. Some were predictable; some weren’t – but all of them affected the way I handle my business (whether that means the kind of publicity I do, the way my agent negotiates various contract provisions, or which publishers I put at the top of my “I want them to publish my books” list).

Almost done; next is the summary, or Putting It All Together.

6. Public Relations – This has to do with the relationship between a business and the public in general – both the business’ current customers and all of the rest of the people who aren’t customers now but who may or may not become so at some future point.

Public Relations is subtly different from Marketing, in that PR is about the business as a whole, while Marketing is about one specific product. Obviously, there’s a lot of overlap, because both of them involve the way customers and potential customers see the business.

Full disclosure: Public Relations/Publicity is probably my least favorite aspect of running a business, right up there with Sales and Marketing. So if you’re looking for good tips and tricks, this is not the best place for them. This is just a basic overview; if you want to get really into this stuff, find somebody who’s a natural and/or who really likes it, and ask them for advice.

For writers, PR is a lot more personal than it is for most businesses. The closest thing a writer has to a brand name is their own name on the book cover; this means that “self-promotion” (which many people are uncomfortable with, and which some other folks frown upon as “showing off” or “not being about the books”) happens to some extent, whether one wants it to or not.

Being aware of this is half the battle, because PR becomes more and more relevant the more books one has out, the larger one’s readership, and the longer one writes – and until they invent practical time-travel, you can’t go back and fix any minor mistakes you made early in your career that snowballed into large problems as time went on.

For the un- and newly-published, PR is usually indistinguishable from Marketing. When you only have one or two books out, everything you do in public tends to be targeted at selling those titles, and larger implications seldom get considered. Also, when one only has one book out, one doesn’t usually get invited to do the sorts of things that would fall under general PR as opposed to marketing a specific book. This gives the writer a chance to ease into the PR stuff, attending conventions as a pro and getting used to doing panels before having to worry about being Guest of Honor at a Worldcon or giving TV interviews on one of the major networks (unless of course your first book is a mega-hit bestseller, in which case you’d better learn fast. We should all have such problems.)

As with Sales and Marketing, there are two levels to consider when you’re thinking about PR – professional (that is, the reputation/relationship the writer has with editors, agents, reviewers, other writers, and other industry professionals), and the general reputation that one has with fans and readers-at-large. There’s a lot of overlap, of course, but sometimes it’s useful to stop and consider for a moment. Dressing up in a clown suit and walking the streets wearing a billboard advertising your new book may get you some attention from local readers, but perhaps you’d be better off coming up with a PR gimmick that looks a little more professional from the editor/agent/etc. point of view.

A lot of early PR is basic courtesy and common sense: when you’re out in public, don’t be obnoxious; don’t insult people; don’t demand to be treated like a star; find the right balance between talking about your new book all the time and never mentioning it at all. “Out in public” most definitely includes Facebook, Twitter, blogs, comments on other people’s blogs, and any other Internet venues, even if they’re supposedly locked or private. This is especially important because the Internet is so very public – whatever you say can be easily seen by publishers, critics, agents, major authors, and important book buyers, none of whom, thirty years back, would have been likely to have much contact with a newbie author. It’s a lot easier to shoot yourself in the foot nowadays.

There are writers who’ve made a point of creating an obnoxious public persona for themselves and succeeded anyway, but there aren’t many. If you are considering something like this, you need to bear in mind that the way you present yourself in public, right from the start, will be with you for the rest of your writing career. If you get tired of acting that way, or decide that it isn’t serving you well, it’ll take an enormous amount of time and effort to change perceptions of you. There are possibly apocryphal tales of authors who had to change their names and start over because they couldn’t stand the public persona they’d constructed, but couldn’t persuade people to see them any other way. It’s much easier to be yourself.

You can, of course, go whole hog on the marketing/publicity for your early books – hitting the convention circuit hard, coming up with ways to get you (and your books) talked about on social media, throwing big book bashes in unusual places for potential readers, etc. The problems with this are a) it takes a lot of time and energy, b) it takes money (in varying amounts, but very little of it is totally free), and c) if you don’t know what you are doing, or don’t have the personality/experience for it, this kind of thing can backfire horribly. Some writers are naturals at this kind of thing – I’ve know five or six of them – but for those who aren’t, it’s usually better to start small and learn it gradually, rather than jumping in with both feet and ending up with two muddy shoes stuck in your mouth.

As a writer’s career develops and her audience expands, the scope of Public Relations gets larger. Rightly or wrongly, people associate writers closely with their books and assume that if they like/dislike the author, they will like/dislike the books (and vice versa). When making a positive impression may affect the sales of twenty titles, it’s a lot more important than if one only has two books out. The kinds of things you get asked to do (or that you can persuade people to let you get in on) get gradually larger and more significant – instead of a talk to the six English and Language Arts teachers at your local high school, you’re giving a talk to three hundred librarians from every school in your state, or to the the 50 folks who make major buying decisions for all the schools in their state.

Some writers (me included) find being “on” in public very tiring; other writers find it energizing. If you’re one of the latter, you may need to remind yourself periodically that PR is not a line function, and you need to apply that energy to Operations. If you’re one of the former, you need to know that actively doing publicity is not obligatory. You can become a writing hermit who is never seen in public – but that, too, is a publicity choice. In other words, you can minimize this area, but you can’t get away from it entirely.

Next up: Executive

5. Administration – This is the overall organization of people and processes, including everything from office management to the human resources department.

 For writers, Administration covers most of the day-to-day tasks of making and tracking submissions, answering mail, returning email and phone calls, filing, organizing manuscripts, maintaining the web site and blog, and so on. This is where the famous Secretary Hat goes – the job of logging submissions and rejections and then getting the manuscript back in the mail.

Administration, like Finance, is often considered dull, unglamorous, and downright boring. It generally involves a lot of paperwork and organization, which puts a lot of folks off. But like Finance, Administration is something no business can do without. The most obvious part is the aforementioned getting the manuscript in the mail – as I’ve said before, editors do not do house-to-house searches for publishable manuscripts. If Admin doesn’t get the manuscript out, the story won’t get published.

There are, however, a lot more ways in which Admin is important. Keeping track of submissions, for instance – you probably don’t want six novels all sitting at the same publishing house at the same time, even if it is your first choice of publisher. You certainly don’t want to forget that this story was rejected by Editor A at Publisher A three years ago, and send it back as a “new” submission. You may want to keep track of which markets respond promptly and which take years, or which places have bought more (or paid more for) particular types of stories.

You also don’t want to lose track of how long things have been under submission – there’s a point at which you really ought to query the publishing house to find out if the ms. got lost somewhere in the process, and that point is neither six days nor six years after you mailed it off. You don’t want the email from the agent or the prospective editor to sit unanswered in your “in” basket for a week. You want your files and data entry up to date in whatever system you have, so that if and when somebody asks whether you own the Portuguese language e-book rights for a story you published twenty years ago, you can look it up without spending hours and hours digging through old piles of paper, only to discover that the contract you’re after seems to have vanished.

Administration can also cover a lot of miscellaneous and occasional jobs, like travel agent, monitoring and reordering office supplies, mailing out ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies), correspondence, keeping the library in order, finding research materials, keeping the web page current, scheduling and coordinating whatever meetings or interviews or events need to be scheduled and coordinated, etc.

In a large company or corporation, pretty much every department has its own Administration section, because every department has paperwork, phone calls, and organizing necessities. For writers (and any small business), Administration doesn’t have such hard edges. Deciding what to write next is Operations; but is keeping track of the story notes and supporting research Administration or part of Operations? Deciding on a list of publishers to query is Marketing; but composing and printing the letters is probably Administration. Doing the taxes is Finance; filing the receipts and entering income and expenses into Quicken all year could be considered either Admin or Finance. Etc.

It isn’t particularly important that this area be broken out from all the others. What is important is that the work gets done – submissions get tracked, manuscripts get mailed, contracts get filed, the web page gets maintained, e-mails and letters get answered, and so on.

However you choose to keep all the various records and processes, it is generally easiest to set up a good system right from the beginning. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that your early work will never get properly entered when you finally get around to it. The problem is that the earlier one is in one’s writing career, the more all this tracking and record-keeping seems like overkill, or at the very least, over-optimism. And besides, it’s boring and it takes time and it’s boring and it takes energy and it’s boring. Nevertheless, if you stay in the writing business, your future self will thank you for doing it all right from the start. Trust me on this one.

Administration also includes the Human Resources department. Since few writers have any actual employees, this covers stuff like dealing with one’s agent, accountant, and any other professional services one has contracted for, plus whatever skills development one decides to invest in for oneself. “Skills development” here refers to anything that’s going to help the business. Writing skills are one obvious area; one can work on them deliberately in lots of ways, from doing informal experimental bits and pieces to critique groups to attending a seminar or workshop to taking classes in grammar or whatever other area you may feel weak in.

There are, however, lots of other business-related skills that are good for a writer to develop. Basic financial management is a fairly obvious weak point for way too many people; checking the latest marketing and publicity techniques never hurts; website management changes so rapidly that it’s certainly worth reading up on every year or so, and maybe even taking a brush-up class periodically. Publicity and Marketing are areas where writers tend to be at one extreme or the other: either they’re naturals, or they’re floundering. There are books and classes on all these things, frequently in Community Ed centers (which are usually cheaper and less time-intensive than college-level night school).

If you’re starting to feel overwhelmed, I’m not surprised. I started feeling overwhelmed about two posts ago, and all I’m really doing here is describing, in categories and a bit more detail than usual, the stuff I have to do to make a living writing. Seeing it all laid out in print makes me realize just how much I and all the other pros I know are juggling all the time…and there are still two areas to go.

Next up: Public Relations.

4. Finance – This has to do with all the monetary aspects of a business.

The financial end of the writing business needs and deserves a lot more attention than many writers give it absent emergencies. Especially the taxes part. I’ve said before that editors don’t do house-to-house searches …but the IRS does, and they’re not nice about it, either. Finances include a lot of record-keeping, starting with the must-do stuff for the IRS. They still like paper trails, so keeping receipts and printed records of income and expenses is vital.

However, Finance for writers isn’t only about keeping good records for your taxes and making your estimated tax payments on time. This is easy for a lot of writers to overlook, because writers don’t need a lot of cash flow to maintain the business – paper and pens don’t cost much, and once you’ve gotten over the initial outlay for a computer and software, you’re set for years. Really, the main thing writers need money for is their own income, and most think of that as a personal thing, not a business matter.

The trouble is that if you don’t pay attention to where the money is coming from – which titles and formats are selling, which publishers pay more and on time, etc. – you can easily end up missing opportunities and/or find yourself suddenly unable to pay your bills.

It is also perilously easy to live in the moment if you don’t have a reality check. Publishing tends to have a much longer pipeline than most jobs, and if you aren’t shoving stuff in now, you can easily run out of cash three or five years down the road and have to scramble – or start hunting for a day job – to cover day-to-day expenses. Paying attention to one’s projected future income lets you know that this was the last of the advance payments, and you only have until it runs out to sell a new proposal to someone.

Expenses are another problem area. I cannot tell you how many people have said to me “But you’re a writer, so that’s tax deductable; why aren’t you buying it?” What they don’t get is that “tax deductable” does not mean “free.” It means it’s an offset to whatever I made; if I didn’t make money (or if I’ve already accumulated enough expenses this year), the benefit is zero this year and maybe a loss carryforward next year…IF I make enough money next year to cover it. And you don’t want to pile up too many losses in a row, or the IRS gets interested and you may lose all your business deductions for several years.

The rule of thumb I use is “If I wouldn’t buy it on sale for 20% off, I shouldn’t buy it just because it’s tax deductable.” This is a little conservative, because as a self-employed person in the US, I pay both halves of the FICA (that’s Social Security tax), which adds up to 15%, and on top of that goes whatever my marginal tax rate is likely to be that year. So really, the “buy it if it’s on sale” rate should be a bit more than 20% off, but I prefer being conservative. Writers in countries other than the U.S., of course, have to work out their own percentages based on their particular tax situations.

If you’re self-publishing or hand-selling your own books, you have a lot more record-keeping because you’ll need to track inventory (unless you’re only doing e-books) and sales. I know more than one writer who’s gotten caught at tax time because for some reason they thought that as long as they spent all their sales income on more inventory, it wouldn’t count as income. If you are one of these, run, do not walk, to a reliable accountant and get them to explain to you what you can and cannot do and how to do it, or you will end up paying a whole lot more than you have to in taxes.

There also seems to be an unfortunate tendency for writers to underestimate how much they’re going to need to live on. They overlook things like insurance and emergency funds and retirement savings when they’re figuring out how much income they need to generate. But if you only include the expenses that come around weekly or monthly, and you spend your entire advance on them, you’re in for a nasty surprise when the car, homeowners’, or health insurance bill arrives, or when you have to spring for Christmas presents, or when the car breaks down. If you aren’t making enough from writing to cover this stuff, then you need a day job, and you’re far better off admitting it than pretending that the car will never break, you’ll never get sick or have an accident, and that Scrooge was right about the whole “bah, humbug” thing.

Cash flow is a particular concern for most writers, because either you know how much money you’re going to get (advance payments), but not when you’re going to get it, or else you know pretty much when you’re going to get it (semi-annual royalty payments), but not how much they’re going to be. What this means is that a) you shouldn’t count on having money to spend unless it’s actually in the bank (I know writers who’ve had trouble making rent or mortgage payments because they charged a large purchase, figuring the advance would come in time to pay for it…and then the advance took another three months to arrive), and b) you need to budget what’s in the bank to last for however many months it’ll be until the next payment is likely to arrive. Getting a $5,000 advance check doesn’t mean you can spend half of it on a new laptop if you aren’t likely to get any more income for the next ten months (unless you really can live on $250/month – do the math).

An especially vital aspect of cash flow management is putting aside enough to pay the taxes. I generally dump half my incoming checks straight into the tax account (which I keep in a separate bank from my regular checking account, to make extra-sure that I’m not likely to tap it for day-to-day expenses and then end up owing the IRS hundreds or, in a good year, thousands of dollars, and being caught short). It’s hard to do, but boy, does it make quarterly estimated tax payments less painful…and if I’m going to have to live on beans and rice for three months in order to make those payments, I know it right away, instead of having it come as a nasty surprise.

And then there’s the other stuff: checking royalty statements, keeping track of advances and subrights sales so you can bug the publisher if the payments are taking too long, watching sales trends so you can tell which of your publicity efforts are having an effect and/or figure out when it’s time to ask for new covers, a reprint, or a new push for a title (or do some of that yourself). A lot of writers consider this optional, mainly because they don’t want to bother with all the record-keeping and reviewing.

I don’t consider any of this optional. Especially checking royalty statements; over the years, I’ve found something like $5,000 worth of errors (all of which the various publishers corrected promptly and without argument when they were pointed out). And the unexplained discrepancy that looked at first glance as if I owed the publisher $300 turned out to be a more complicated error that meant they actually owed me $1,000, so yes, I report everything I find, whether it looks as if it’s good for me or for them. Computerization has eliminated errors in addition and subtraction, but it has resulted in a lot more data entry problems, so the checking still needs to be done.

Keeping good records allows you to know how your business is doing financially – and quite often why, which can give you an idea what to do about it. It also provides essential input into lots of decisions, from whether to attend a bookstore event/autographing, to whether to change publishers or agents, to which of two equally tempting ideas might be better to work on next.

Note that I didn’t imply that all of these decisions should be made strictly on financial grounds. You may be well aware that the autographing at a local bookstore will take three hours (what with driving time), and you’re only likely to sell two hardcovers to folks who wouldn’t have bought them anyway (meaning you’re working for around $1.30 per hour, less gas money), so financially it’d be a dead loss. But you may want to do it anyway, for the publicity, for contact with your fans/readers, for goodwill with the bookstore and its employees (who may be more willing to hand-sell your book once they’ve met you), or just because you get such a lift out of doing this kind of thing that you always come home and write six times as much for the next three days.

On the other hand, if you’re paying $300 to fly to another city for a similar autographing, the expense is so much greater than any goodwill generated that it’s probably not worth doing. On the third hand, if you’re going to be in some other town anyway, it may well be worth the good publicity to set up a couple of local autographings or unpaid library appearances (especially if you can do enough of them to justify deducting some of the travel expenses).

Crunching the numbers is something many would-be writers think of as boring and uninteresting, but it is surprising how fascinating all those figures can be when it’s your book, your sales, and your money.

Next: Administration