BC Writing Workshop #3 - Creating a Business Plan

Creating a Business Plan

This workshop is when we really start getting into the meat and potatoes of what it takes to plan a professional writing career.  While these tips are probably most critical for indie writers, they are all still applicable for trad writers.

For those who are not business savvy, a business plan is a series of decisions and research in a large document meant to describe a new business.  Business plans are what people put together to make sure they’ve thought everything out before spending any money on a new business, and to provide a roadmap resource.

A business plan is also part of a person’s collateral if they go to ask a bank for a new loan (or an extension).

So what does all of this actually mean?  Well, basically, a business plan is just expanding on the idea in the last module.  Who are you?  What is your business (brand)?  A business plan is where we take these general ideas and start fleshing them out.

For instance, if you were opening a new restaurant, you would want to know what demographic you will be serving, and where they live.  Opening a 5 star restaurant in an impoverished area would be a horrible idea.

As a writer, you need to know who you are writing for.  If you are writing books to be consumed by straight young men, advertising with shirtless, pouting men would not be a good idea.

This brings us into marketing, another portion of a business plan.  Most business plans will include a marketing plan.  Various professionals argue about how far your marketing plan should carry you; I personally think 2 years is the absolutely minimum a person should plan for.  Most brick and mortar businesses aren’t even financially solvent with a positive ROI (return on investment) until about year 3.

Before I start drowning in you minutia or tedious business-speak, let’s just examine the basic pieces of a business plan.  I’m lifting these categories from an excellent article at entrepreneur.com, then translating them into what they mean for writers.

This is the original article:  https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/247575

Executive Summary

This section is usually meant for a bank or lending institution.

As a writer, this part should probably be written for yourself.  What are you trying to do with your writing?  Do you want to make stories for your family, to make gobs of money, create memories?

This section is a good place to list who you want to be and what you are trying to accomplish--basically the information that we talked about in the last module.

Business Description

What genres are you going to write in?  Who are the big authors?  What’s popular?

Market Strategies

Who reads the kind of stories you want to write?  How are you going to reach them?  What is going to be the overall look and feel of your marketing campaigns, and how are you going to structure them?

Competitive Analysis

If you don’t have a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) anywhere else in your business plan, you should at least have one here.

I put together a SWOT for other, overlapping authors, market changes, and sales venues before I published my first book.

I will obviously be talking more about this later.

Design and Development Plan

This portion can be where you flesh out your brand decisions from the previous workshop.  What is your art going to look like?

Are you going to be polished, or be recognizable as an indie?  Are you comfortable with a trad publisher sourcing covers etc for you?

In general, what do you want your products/books to look like?  What will they say about you?

Operations & Management Plan

Who all is going to help you with your writing?

Do you have a cover artist picked out?  How about an editor?  Are you using beta readers?

If you are brand new, it might be a good idea to list your contact information for everyone you will be relying on, and keep your business plan as a document of record (and put it somewhere safe, like in the cloud or a safe deposit box).  This way if your computer explodes or your house burns down, you can have a backup somewhere of your most important information.

Financial Factors

How much money do you have to spend, and how are you going to divvy it up?

Finances can include covers, editing, day-to-day bills, marketing, etc.  Are you going to pay yourself, or reinvest all the money you make?  Honestly, this section will really vary depending on where you’re at and what your plans are.

Always add a little to your original estimates--5% to 15% at least.

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So there you have it.  This has been an overview of what a business plan is and how it relates to writing.  You may also understand the method to my madness now with how the workshops are structured.

The workshop before this was about your brand, which dovetails into the Executive Summary.  In a similar vein, the next few workshops will be covering the other portions of a business plan.  The workshops will address what you need to think about as a writer in order to make intelligent decisions for your business.

...Because that is the secret, folks.  As a professional writer, you are a business owner an an entrepreneur.  Knowing this ahead of time will give you a huge advantage over 95% of the other writers out there...most of whom unfortunately will fail.

*Note:  There are resources for business plan templates all over the internet, but if you want to skip ahead of the class here, or just see an example of what I’m talking about, check out:  

https://www.score.org/resource/business-plan-template-startup-business

Business plan templates don’t all align perfectly with terminology etc, but you should have enough knowledge by now to make sense of the link I gave.