Juiced On Writing

Firstly, I’m not a business plan writer by any way, shape or form. I used to work in I.T. and was a very good writer of Test Plans and Strategies, of juggling budgets (which weren’t really mine) with bodies, and facilitating a compromise over the overall business product sales goals with the time given to me to achieve quality in that product (normally in direct disproportions).

What I wasn’t was a small business holder or self-employed contractor going with cap in hand to my bank manager wanting to provide enough evidence to convince him that I was worth a gamble on, and that I really did need to invest in some more stock, and perhaps also needed another staff member to help out.

I figure some of both a regular old Business Plan and some of an I.T. Software Development strategy might give me a shot of producing my 2009 Fiction Writing Business Plan. Or maybe not. Time may well see…here is my own steps to building a business plan / goal plan or career plan for 2009′s Writing Efforts…

Introduction to my Writing Business Plan

Here are the Components of a Writing Business Plan, the elements of which are work in progress, much as my fiction writing work continues to be.

This business plan is designed for the purposes of my own writing plans for a year of time. This will include mostly longer fiction writing plans, but with some non-fiction work also. Additionally, as writing remains a part-time and hobby-istic business for me, the Business Plan and goals can not be taken out of context with the rest of my own life.

This means that such a career plan must be designed concurrently with planning sessions for other aspects of my life such as other hobbies, family and work commitments. Each will provide events and problems – and opportunities – which will both impact this Writing Business Plan and could alter the navigation and strategies through it over the year. At the same time as strategising this Writing Plan, I am also thinking more holistically about what else I want to achieve over 2009.

I may share my actual 2009 Goal Plans with you in a later entry – this won’t be in a structured document as you might expect. I intend doing all of these goal or business plans or strategies via a mindmap with additional attachments of supporting documents and notes.

The Components of a Writing Goal or Business Plan

1. End-Goal and Year-Goal – The Objectives

What exactly am I planning for? What can I reasonably expect to strategise and achieve over the course of the next year of writing?

The answer to the first is probably obvious, and shared by many others. I’m not after being a black swan in this world, a JK Rowling or Stephen King. I just want to be published enough in my genre of choice that I can “make a living” out of writing – enough to not tremble should one of those rainy days come along, or my husband find himself made redundant.

How much is enough, though? And what proportion of this is feasible in my first year of strategising? What smaller objectives must I plan for to get to the ultimate goal?

These short-term and long-term goals aren’t just monetary either…

2. Product and Customer

What exactly is my product? That’s easier to work out if I’m a business owner – or a corporate puppet for that matter. But some evidence can be found already in my own definition of why I might be writing this business plan in the first place – for Fiction writing. Fiction, not journalistic or blogging, non-fiction or even poetry for that matter. My heart – currently – lies in Fiction. However I must not discount the non-fiction work – which should also be included as a secondary product of mine.

That secondary product has been at the forefront in my writing world this last year – this blog, and my non-fiction but associated products for writers – ebooks, reports (and not just in writing). Perhaps I can still fit those secondary products into the Business Plan for my writing year. Perhaps those will be part of the overall strategy…

So, in deciding what my product – for 2009 – might be, I come down to perhaps defining the type of fiction, maybe even some genres. Short stories – no, not really. Probably novels. And probably some ebooks or reports too.

What we’re talking here is – Wordcount. Length. That makes up a product of some writing type. I just have to decide what it is. That’s the fun part.

And lastly, on this subject, I’ve got to remind myself that a Product is not a product without a customer (that’s not me!). If I choose a such-and-such-a product, then who are my potential customers? What are their needs and wants – what service am I about to offer them?

Customers to me mean several different people – from the People section of my plan (family, and possibly external contacts) to something else – my market. If I have a business plan to get a novel published, then I need to understand the market for that genre – there’s no point writing the country’s greatest novel, if nobody actually wants to buy or read it.

3. SMART Goals

So, I might have some end goals, and a product or two, but there’s no point without some performance factors. How else do I know that I’ve achieved my business plan if I don’t have some way to measure my success or not? And to measure – well, I need to have those goals set out in the first place.

S = Specific. What specific products and goals will I have for 2009? How many novels – twenty? Or just the one? And at what state- finished, or a figment of my imagination?

M=Measurable. How do I measure the state of my achievements, my products or goals? Can I get someone else to? How will this be tracked? (See No. 10)

A=Achievable. Twenty novels might be technically achievable, but possibly not of the quality I might expect and owe any poor reader of my product(s). But sitting on my laurels writing just one novel per year probably won’t get me that working salary I need as an end goal, either. (Nb: A can also stand for Ambitious, Adjustable or Active, depending on interpretation).

R=Results Orientated. What exactly will a year from now (December 2009) look like if my objectives have a successful outcome? (Isn’t this the point – the goals should support outcomes or results which move you steps forward to your longer term goals). What factors make this vision up? Is it money, a contract, a book written or a book published – or at least an agent interested in you? And what if these results aren’t achieved – what if my big submission fails to make it through the slush piles of my world? (Nb: R can also mean Rewarding, Relevant, Related, Realistic or even – Recyclable, depending on what Smart system you are learning).

T=Time. What time am I prepared to invest in performing my business plan? Is this SMART in itself? Will it produce? If I don’t have the necessary time, how will I create or negotiate for it? What other things can be sacrificed to provide the time needed? (NB: T is often interpreted as Time-bound or Timely).

4. People

Originally I fell for the old chestnut – I’m the writer. It’s just me. I’m the only “people” in the plan. There’s nothing like that old martyrdom of being a self-dependent business person, striving against the turning of the planet to produce a work of wonder and glory, pulling it from the herbit’s cave I live in and blinding people with my independent creativity. Unfortunately this dismisses the other people in my family, and other commitments which the business plan for my writing activities will have to work with – not against, as much as I quite fancy that hermit’s life.

Of course, even including my family and other work commitments washes over a bigger more important element – having to get out there and contact agents, publishers, magazines or whatever. Scary stuff – the stuff which stops me from ever striding ahead. I would much rather stick my ostrich head into the sand and pretend none of those people exist. Hence People becomes a large component of my plan for next year. If it’s written down, I can’t be such a bird.

5. Budget

Okay. I have none. Not one penny. But every plan needs an investor, and for mine – I’m it. So any budget comes from me, even if it means I have to save up three months from my part-time work to pay for an investment in entering a contest or something. These little things count, and so does a strategy to deal with the big stuff. Say an agent gets excited about me (who said a business plan can’t dabble in a little fantastical “what ifs”?) and wants to meet with me in London. Where’s the babysitting coming from, and where’s the £35 off-peak train fare down there coming from also? Every budget and business plan needs a little contingency planning.

And if I do make money from the plan  – what should I do with it? In fact – let’s not muddy this with taxes and registering with the government. Although that idea has to be planned for, doesn’t it?

Budgets should, at best choice, at least acknowledge the external side of this plan. I have a blog site, for instance. Should hosting fees be thought about? Why, yes. And then there’s the asides – expenses – paper, printing ink, laptops, software, Blue Ribbon fully-caffienated ground roast coffee beans (the later for bringing out the muse within). And what about acquiring knowledge – books or courses?

6. Training and Knowledge

I’m still a newbie. That’s pretty much one of the few guaranteed elements of this whole plan. I’m both staff, personel, my own customer and my own service. Add to that a mother, wife, part-time child worker and general domestic goddess and you have enough roles to tie up two gravestones should I run under a bus accidentally. Just like most newbie writers.

How do I get out of this newbie thing? Enough to at least make a go of the business plan without feeling rubbish about it within a month’s time from the new year?

Well, probably training. Whether this is simply reading writing magazines, or taking some courses, or joining up with an online group – something towards training should be incorporated into my overall business plan. It’s only fair.

Plus, training and learning is actually a nice incentive plan for the business plan also, a reward for the hard work of the year.

To make training a working part of any strategy I shall have to be reasonably professional about it, however. Coming from the corporate world, I am well aware of the propensity of employers facing harder financial times to always drop the training budget for employees as a first-off. I’m also aware of many employees demanding training just for the sake of a staff perk – training for the sake of training. I, like many people, can easily fall into the same trap.

To identify my own training needs, I need to strategise the elements of what knowledge and skills I need, yet do not yet possess. In my business plan I have to identify what I do not have. Great. That sounds like fun. Not.

7. Execution of the Strategy and Milestones

The actual Business Plan wouldn’t be a plan without – well, a plan. It’s all well and good having a defined product and smart objectives, but I’ve got a year to fulfill them, and doubt seriously, despite that new year resolution sparkliness of January, that I can do it all in that first month. I have to distribute…

[Heck, it would be even better if I could delegate the plan, but I'll work on distribution as a more plausible option for the time being]…

What are my milestones, and when will I action the goals and ideas which will get me to them?

One of my milestones should be measuring and adjusting the plan over time – things change. 2009 is guaranteed to give me some of those changes, despite – and because of some of my best intentions. A good plan has plenty of contingency built in. (No. 9 deals with this).

8. Mission Statement

Mission statements, oh how I hate them. These first came out in my corporate world over twenty years ago. Staff would spend half a year having to come up with some pat commercial statements which made the executive board happy, and were printable in one sentence on a corporate poster. You would – and still do – then see the same phrases peppered over every single corporate office on the same street. Human Resources staff ran black markets off them.

My favourite is “Just Do it” – thank you Nike. Or the equally obnoxious expectation of all staff members to have a “Can Do attitude” which is always brought up to hit you around the head with when you point out that the highly implausible ideas of the new chief executive are not only unrealistic, but would take the entire workforce five million hours to achieve, thus reducing the ability to actually produce anything tangible which customers have actually asked for, if he’d only spoken with real people, and not yes-men hovering around him like some grand-master champion of the world, hoping for a bigger Christmas bonus. Sometimes a little “No” can do the world a whole lot of good. If only our world’s Banks had been told no a year or so ago, then we’d not be in this economic position we find ourselves in right now…

Er, still…

My Business Plan deserves a simple mission statement – a one sentence definition of what I’m trying to achieve for the year. What would make me happy. The Mission Statement is sourced from that holiest of grails – the New Years resolutions of this writer. Maybe even from before that – the Christmas wish. A Business Plan just puts it into a form where it has a better chance of becoming a reality.

9. Contingency and Alternatives

I’ve already acknowledged the need for contingency plans throughout this initial diatribe. Part of the whole plan is also seeking out alternatives – whether it’s different ways to achieve my end goals, or different strategies to move into if something “goes wrong” or more optimistically “goes so right it’s like living a dream”.

Risk Assessment

My Business Plan therefore needs an assessment of risk – what might go wrong, and how should I deal with it.

Prioritisation

And what goals or end goals are less of a priority (and are therefore expendable) if I need to do so? What are the top priorities, and which actions and activities are simply nice-to-haves? Which should have my main focus on? In project management terms (it’s a good idea to think of your short-term goals as projects, and to manage them) we are talking about analysing and deciding on which of your products and goals are on the critical-path (and which ones aren’t, no matter how exciting they might be).

Alternatives

And what alternatives are there out there? How does the industry change – or my own needs and desires over that year? Over the year there is bound to be something which produces an alternative path, and something else which requires research to assess.

10. Tracking & Management

Finally, whilst putting the strategy into action seems relatively easy – if I’ve got the objectives and timeframes correct; there’s no point if I don’t know how I’m doing. Measures should be thought about when making the little goals SMART, and one of the easiest is setting milestones, deadlines and dates – once set, it becomes obvious if those objectives aren’t met in time. But…not meeting a deadline for a goal doesn’t give me the reason why.

Perhaps tracking – of all the activities leading towards those goals (or against them, in some cases) is as simple as keeping a writing journal, taking down daily notes of writing activities and thoughts. Writing down these activities, putting pen to paper, is evidence of management – and ownership- of the plan.

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