Writers, business plans, and me

The “Publishing Options” series concluded with the third post I did last week, but I wanted to also talk a bit about some of the other business decisions writers have to make. Specifically, about business plans.

The vast majority of writers don’t have even an informal business plan, especially since many of them view a “business plan” as something one does because someone else needs or wants it, rather than something that will be of benefit to them. The templates available online mostly don’t recognize this; they are full of business-speak that is really off-putting to many writers, and a lot of what they cover is irrelevant to writers (at least, in my opinion).

The thing is, there are different kinds of business plan. What many writers would benefit from is what’s called an internal business plan—something that’s just for them, to cover and perhaps make explicit the decisions they’ve made about various aspects of their writing career. This kind of business plan is basically a list of the various decisions someone has made about their business, sorted and grouped in a way that make them easier to follow.

And no, I don’t have a formal, written-out, “Section I, Part A, Subsection 3” type business plan. What I have is a habit of looking at my writing business as a business, and periodically reviewing the decisions I’ve made in key categories to see whether they’re still working for me…and what I would have to do to get them to work better, and whether that’s a trade-off I think is worth it in that area. So here are the pieces of a traditional business plan that I find relevant to my writing life, and when and how I look at them.

The executive summary is essentially the two-paragraph query letter version of a business plan, and it’s pointless for a personal, internal business plan. I don’t even bother thinking about it.

The main things I look at are in the second part, the business summary. There are four areas under this that I consider regularly. The first area I look at here is “business structure,” which for me is a sole proprietorship (some writers choose other structures, like incorporating as an S corporation). About once every ten years or so, I check with my tax accountant to see whether I’m still best off as a sole proprietorship. Next is an overview/analysis of the book industry, which I admit I don’t keep as close an eye on as I probably should. Mostly I just read articles about the industry and talk shop with other writers at conventions. Third is my team—editor, agent, webmaster, crit group, accountant, etc. A couple of times a year, I try to stop and think about how things are going with these people, whether there are things I need to tell them, whether I’m doing a good job of listening to them, and so on. Finally, there are “business objectives,” which for me means the stuff I need or want to get done in the next one to five years. This covers all the business-related projects and “to do” items, from writing the next book to promotion to managing my backlist to planning and researching my next couple of books to making sure my estimated taxes get paid on time.

I don’t generally worry about the things in the marketing summary; I’ve outsourced that to my publishers. If I were self-publishing or working in more than one genre, this is where I’d think about things like whether I wanted to stick to the North American book market, or try to arrange for wider ebook distribution, or alternate writing mystery novels with writing children’s problem books.

I also don’t bother much with product analysis, because I just write books, but people who want to branch out into graphic novels or video games or doing their own Youtube video mini-movies, or who want to work in multiple genres, might need to look at this more. I do occasionally take a look at the new alternatives that come around, and think about whether one of them would be fun or interesting or lucrative to pursue, but at this point in my career, “fun” and “interesting” are a lot more important to me than “lucrative.”

The marketing plan is another thing I have mainly outsourced, partly because this is definitely not my area of expertise and partly because I purely despise doing the planning part. Extroverts seem to really enjoy having an excuse to plan and put on events, and a self-publisher would, at the least, have to worry about things like pricing, cover design, and how to drive sales. I keep track of my appearances, which I enjoy doing but not arranging, and I do a fair amount of work for them. You could also consider this blog and the occasional writing course I teach as part of my marketing plan, though I lump them in under my “to-do” list in the business section.

Logistics and operations are also irrelevant to me. Ebook publishers would probably count website maintenance, book layout and design, cover art, and such in this category. People self-publishing hard copy books have to deal with all of it—suppliers, production, shipping/fulfillment, inventory management, and so on. The only thing I consider that sort of falls in this category is how often I need to update/replace my word processing software, my desktop computer, and my laptop, all of which only need reviewing when they’re getting too old to run present-day software or operating systems.

I also don’t even try to make financial projections, because sales numbers are entirely beyond my control, which would make me crazy, and I don’t write based on that kind of consideration anyway, so the information is of no use to me. I do, however, keep track of actual writing income and expenses, and I have intense discussions with my agent when we’re negotiating a new contract.

In other words, I check in regularly but informally on all of the business aspects I’ve chosen to incorporate in my writing career. I revisit my writing business decisions periodically, and it’s a lot easier to do that if you have a list that includes the important areas one needs to look at and the decisions one has made. Otherwise, one ends up staring at something and thinking “Why didn’t I start/stop doing this five/ten/fifteen years ago? Doing/not-doing this has cost me thousands of dollars and/or prevented me from having a lot of fun!”