Thanks to my coach Lanette Pottle I have something I’ve never had before in my life — a publishing plan.
I am not, by nature, a planner. Back when I lived in South Carolina and regularly attended a writing group, we joked that there were two kinds of writers: planners and pantsers.
Planners worked from outlines. They thought about their book covers before they were halfway through the book. (Sometimes before they started writing it.) They could not only tell you what happened next, but also what had happened 15 years before the story opened.
Meanwhile, pantsers flew by the seat of their pants. They couldn’t create an outline because they had no idea what happened next. They were as surprised as the reader when they discovered their character’s dark backstory.
I was born a pantser.
But I’m also a business owner. As a business owner, I have to plan. As a content strategist for education providers and the companies that support them, planning is practically half of my job. I’m actually pretty good at it – just ask my clients.
However, until I started working with Lanette, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could apply my strategic planning skills to my own writing. Lately, I’ve started viewing off-the-clock writing as part of my business. I’m putting the blog posts for my own work on a schedule, just like I do for my clients, and I’m planning ahead for what’s going to happen next in the independent publishing side of my business.
In short, I’ve made a publishing plan.
The publishing plan so far
I’ve created a plan for my independent publishing business that should also help my freelance content creation business (win-win). And here it is:
- Learn all I can about independent publishing using my well-honed research skills (I was a journalist and now I’m a content writer – research is my jam)
- Start marketing my writing (through this blog, Instagram, and Facebook)
- Publish a non-fiction book
- Market it to find what works and what doesn’t
- Start marketing my novel “Nothing’s Ever Lost“
- Publish my novel (by then I should have the marketing piece a little more in hand)
- Publish more non-fiction
- Publish more novels
- Repeat those last two steps until I decide to move on to phase two (which for now will remain super secret)
The audience for the novel is teens and young adults who have dealt with the loss of a loved one. They prefer to deal with difficult subjects through humor and are probably also fantasy and/or science fiction fans. Meanwhile, the audience for the eBook is business owners who want to do the best marketing they can for the smallest investment of time and money.
Although the two audiences almost couldn’t be more different, I think a lot of what I learn while marketing/publishing the non-fiction will be transferable to the novel and vice versa. If I’m wrong, I think my publishing plan will still teach me a lot about self-publishing.
Do you have a plan for your writing? Tell me about it in the comments or send me a note.