author business plan

Creating an Author Business Plan: Professional Development

September 17, 2015 by • Writing • Tags: , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Janice Hardy Fiction UniversityThis week marks the final installment in the series I’ve been running at Fiction University about writing our author business plan. I think this final section is one of the most important for independent authors.

Self-published books still have a bad reputation among many because too many independent authors put out their books before those books are “ready.” The professional development section of our business plan helps make sure we’re less likely to be one of those authors. It’s where we set improvement goals both in the writing craft and in the business side.

I hope you’ll join me today for Creating an Author Business Plan: Professional Development. 

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Internal Dialogue is now available from Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, or Apple iBooks.. (You also might want to check out Grammar for Fiction Writers or Showing and Telling in Fiction.)

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Creating Our Author Business Plan: Book by Book Marketing

August 20, 2015 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

The marketing section of our author business plan is unique in that we need to think about our overall marketing strategy as well as the specific marketing activities we’re going to use for each individual book we produce.

Last month I talked about developing our overall marketing plan, and this month I’m going to suggest ways we can create a successful plan for marketing each individual book.

Please join me at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University for my regular monthly guest post!

P.S. Every summer I try to travel around and guest post a bit, but now that the summer is drawing to a close, I only have one more guest post (for the fantastic Jami Gold), and then it’ll be back to business as usual here on the blog 🙂

Janice Hardy Fiction University

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Internal Dialogue is now available from Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, or Apple iBooks.. (You might also want to check out Grammar for Fiction Writers or Showing and Telling in Fiction.)

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Creating an Author Business Plan: Our Marketing Plan

July 16, 2015 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

The marketing section of our author business plan is unique in that we need to think about our overall marketing strategy as well as the specific marketing activities we’re going to use for each individual book we produce.

It’s important that we look at it from both levels. Doing so provides us with guidance and stability in an ever-changing environment.

If you’d like to read the rest of the post, please join me at Fiction University for my regular monthly guest post.

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Internal Dialogue is now available from Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, or Apple iBooks.. (You might also want to check out Grammar for Fiction Writers, Showing and Telling in Fiction or Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

I’d love to have you sign up to receive my posts by email. All you need to do is enter your email address below and hit the “Follow” botton.

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Creating an Author Business Plan: Our Product Plan

May 26, 2015 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , • 3 Comments

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

We’ve now reached a milestone in writing our author business plan. Last month, we finished our author business plan summary and our Business Operation section. In other words, we’re officially into the body of our author business plan where we need to start laying out practical steps to reach our goals. (If you missed the earlier posts, it’s important to start from the beginning because we’ve already talked about setting our goals, choosing our stories, and identifying our audience.)

Everything we’ve written down in our author business plan prior to this point will remain fairly stable. In the upcoming sections, we’ll need to be much more flexible, adjusting as we go. What we write down is our starting point.

In the coming posts, I’ll be talking about our competitive analysis section, our marketing plan section, and our professional development section, but before we can do that, we need to complete our Product Plan.

Please join me at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University for the rest of this post on Creating An Author Business Plan: Our Product Plan.

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Showing and Telling in Fiction or Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

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Creating an Author Business Plan: How Will the Business Run?

April 16, 2015 by • Writing • Tags: , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@Marcy Kennedy)

In our ongoing quest to write up an author business plan that will guide us in the years to come, we’ve already talked about setting our goals, choosing our stories, and identifying our audience. I think of that as the fun stuff because it feels like it’s closely related to the actual writing of our books.

But now we need to dive into the business part of our Author Business Plan Summary. You knew it was coming eventually, right? Writing this part of our author business plan might not seem as exciting or creative, but it’s essential. We can’t have long-term success unless we’re smart about our money and the operation of our business.

As independent authors, most of us start out on a shoestring. Some of us even start out with no string at all. It doesn’t matter whether you have $10,000 to invest in your business when you start or nothing—you still need to write this part of your author business plan. I promise to make it as painless as possible.

Join me for my regular monthly guest post at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University where I talk about Creating an Author Business Plan: How Will the Business Run?

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Showing and Telling in Fiction or Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

I’d love to have you sign up to receive my posts by email. All you need to do is enter your email address below and hit the “Follow” botton.

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Creating an Author Business Plan: Identifying Your Audience

March 19, 2015 by • Uncategorized • Tags: , , , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Welcome back to the third installment in my series on writing your author business plan. We’re working on our Author Business Plan Summary, and we’ve already covered setting our goals and choosing our stories. If you haven’t read those posts yet, I recommend you go back and start from the beginning.

Our next logical step is to identify our audience.

Please join me for my regular monthly guest post at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University where I look at how to narrow down the core audience for our books.

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Showing and Telling in Fiction or Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

I’d love to have you sign up to receive my posts by email. All you need to do is enter your email address below and hit the “Follow” botton.

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Creating An Author Business Plan: Setting Your Goals

January 29, 2015 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

In my last post, I announced that I was going to start a series helping busy authors write their author business plans. I’m excited to be back now, facing 2015, and diving in.

The first section of your author business plan is your Author Business Plan Summary. Because it actually contains a lot of different information, I’m not going to cover it all today. That would be overwhelming and make this post much too long. Remember that this is about breaking it down into manageable, unintimidating pieces. One small bit that you can do each day.

Eventually, your summary will include your goals, the types of books you plan to publish, your target number of releases per year, your audience, what outside help you plan to hire, the form and method of distribution for your books, and how you’ll deal with income. You’ll likely end up giving a paragraph to each.

Today we’re going to focus on your author goals. If you look back at my opening post “Three Questions to Ask Yourself Before Writing an Author Business Plan,” you’ll remember that we’re focusing on what I called the “career writer” and we’re looking at this from the perspective of someone who wants to independently publish (or hybrid publish). A career writer is someone who views their writing as either a full-time or part-time job or wants it to be one. They want (and need) their writing to make a profit.

If you’d like to read the rest of this post, head over to Fiction University for my monthly guest post–Creating an Author Business Plan: Setting Your Goals.

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers, is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Mastering Showing and Telling in Your Fiction.)

Both books are available in print and ebook forms.

I’d love to have you sign up to receive my posts by email. All you need to do is enter your email address below and hit the “Follow” botton.

Enter your email address to follow this blog: