How to Create a Business Plan for Your Nonfiction Writing Career

If you want to get to the place called “Successful Authorship,” you need a map. A business plan for your career, just like the business plan for your book, provides such a map. And these two plans work together. If you take the time to create both, you end up with a big picture view, as well as fine-detail view, to help you get to your destination.

Create Your Personal Map to Successful Authorship

No matter how you plan to publish, a book proposal serves as the time-tested template used to create a business plan for your book. This business plan also provides step-by-step directions for how to get from the idea stage to the successfully published stage of your book project. As such, it provides a map and directions for one stop on the way to your final destination, “Successful Authorship.” If you plan to write more than just one book, this map will feature a variety of stops along the way.

As you go through the process of developing a business plan for your book, it is important to complete the section called “Spin-offs.” It asks you to decide if you are a one-book or multiple-book author. This requires answering this question: Will I write a follow-up book, a sequel or a series?

Used carefully and conscientiously, this one business plan section can become a mini plan of its own: your author or writer career plan.  To accomplish this, think beyond your current book idea to what comes after you complete the first book. Create a plan that includes all of your subsequent books as well.

Are You A Multiple-Book Author?

Most publishers prefer to take on multiple-book authors. The reason is simple: The more books you write and publish, the more books you are likely to sell. You represent a better “investment” if you can show that you have many marketable book ideas.

If you plan to self-publish, the same holds true. You stand a better chance of succeeding over time if you publish more than one book via your publishing company.

If you decide early in your career whether you will be a multiple-book or a one-book author, you can create a map and directions that help you move forward in a focused manner. You will travel from book project to book project in a way that builds toward successful authorship by taking your readers with you from one book to the next.

Create Your Personal Author Career Plan

To create your personal author career plan, brainstorm possible books you might write in the future. Create a list of books and pitches for each one. Then sort the ideas into a logical order by asking yourself:

• Which one should follow my current project?
• Which one comes after that?
• How do they all fit together into a meaningful theme or structure?

Now look at all of these ideas. Maybe you have three. Maybe you have five. Maybe, like me, you have fifteen or twenty and they range in topic. Can you find a way to bridge from one topic to the next? Can you find an “umbrella theme,” something that links everything together?

Include only those that immediately follow your current book project in the proposal or plan for that book. Include all of your book ideas in a personal plan for your writing career.

Follow the Plan to Create Your Author Brand

A series of books, a certain type of books or a group of books in a particular subject area can help you build an author “brand.” For example, you could write books about a particular topic, such as powerful women, high finance, difficult relationships, motherhood, or travel to Europe.  All your books might inspire, teach as certain subject, take people on exciting journeys, or offer hope. Whatever you choose becomes your area of expertise, your unique label or the “thing” for which you are known.

How and when your roll out your books—and what books you decide to write—then fall into place. Once you have your career business plan, write and publish each one of your books in succession.

Your personal career business plan offers you the big-picture view of your trip to Successful Authorship. The individual business plans for each book you write, each one a stop along the way, ensure you produce marketable books so you do, indeed, make it to that final destination.

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