I used to think that business plans were for writers who were more focused on writing to market. I didn’t realize that even writers who write for passion can benefit from them. This realization came to me when I sat down to evaluate what I’ve been doing for the past two years. I was going through burnout, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I knew I still loved to write. I was just having trouble getting excited about writing, and I didn’t know how to get that joy back. (Quite side note: I came across this article today that I think can help authors who may be struggling with burnout. It’s about setting boundaries. I recommend reading it.)

Back to this post…

Why create a business plan?

If you’re writing what you love, then that takes a big chunk out of the pain of writing. I still think there’s nothing worse than writing something you hate. If what you love lines up with what’s popular in the market, you have the best of both worlds, and there’s nothing wrong with looking for an angle within your preferred genre where you can pick a trope or two to make your book more appealing to more people. I don’t believe that you need to choose between writing to market or writing for passion. I do think you can overlap the two. You just don’t want to go so far off into the market that you lose the passion for what you’re doing.

I think a business plan helps, regardless of why you’re writing. It’s not enough to wait for the muse to show up. You need to be intentional about beginning and finishing your books, and you have to be smart about it. You can’t push yourself so hard that you burn yourself out. You also can’t be so lax that you barely make any progress. You need to find the middle ground.

A business plan should help you complete the stories you start, and it should give you plenty of breaks so you can keep going for the long haul. It should be flexible. This plan, however, should have a deadline. The deadline is your goal, and you need one for every step of the way in order to stay on track. Deadlines are necessary to stay focused. You need a deadline for the first draft. A deadline for the cover. A deadline for the edits. A deadline for when you will publish the book. You can even set deadlines on when to promote your book.

The key to making deadlines you can stick to is to make them doable. They have to be ones you can reach. No two writers are alike. We all have different paces that we can write books. So I encourage people to look at what their sweet spot is. Every writer has a sweet spot. This sweet spot is the number of books you can comfortably write in the course of a year.

The sweet spot will give you a realistic plan for your own writing goals.

To get an idea of what your sweet spot it, I suggest looking at a couple of things. Over the years, how many books have you published? What is the average word count of those books? The longer you’ve been writing and publishing, the clearer this sweet spot is to see. If you’re just starting out, then start tracking these things down until you notice a pattern.

Once you know how many books you tend to publish in a year and how long those books are, you can start your plan. If you’re happy with the number of books you typically put out in a year, stick with that goal. If you would like to get more out, why not raise the bar higher? If you’re burned out and need a break, maybe it’s best to pull back and publish less books for the next year.

An example of how to create a business plan:

Here’s an example of what I did to give you an idea of what you can do to create your own plan:

I tend to publish six books a year. My average word count per book is 60,000 words. (I haven’t done this for the past couple of years due to burnout, but before then, I was pretty stable with that number.) I sat down and multiplied how many words total I tend to write.

60,000 words X 6 books = 360,000 words

Then I took 360,000 words and divided it by 52 weeks (since there are 52 weeks in the year).

360,000 words/52 = 6,923.07

I rounded up that up to 6,924.

So to reach my goal of 360,000 words a year, I need to write 6,924 words a week. Now I want to have three days off a week to give myself a break. So I decided to take 6,924 and divide it by 4.

6,924/4 = 1,731 words

That means I need to write 1,731 words on the days I write.

But then I wanted to make sure I’m hitting my goal of 360,000, so I reversed the formula. (I learned long ago to double check the math, especially since math isn’t my strong suit.) I multiplied 1731 by 4, I came up with 6,924 words a week, which checks out. So then I multiplied 6,924 by 52 and got 360,048. Since I rounded up the word count from 6,923 to 6,924, this discrepancy makes sense.

So anyway, that calculation helped me develop my own business writing plan to produce six books a year.

This is a very doable goal for me. I can write 1731 words in about 2-3 hours, and that factors in the breaks I take to give my eyes a rest. (I don’t want to strain my eyes doing this.) Allowing myself three days off every week will give me time to rest my mind, and hopefully, avoid any burnout in the future.

Edited to add this next part…

Chris Webb made a really good point that I need to point out. Not everyone can write all 52 weeks of the year. And I was thinking it might be best if people don’t. Sometimes it’s nice to have longer than a three-day break that I was allowing myself. Of course, you can give yourself any kind of break to fit your life. I can only speak for what my life is like. But who knows if something will come up, and I can’t write for a week? It is good to have a buffer.

Let’s say I wanted to write four days a week but only wanted to write 48 weeks.

Here are the calculations Chris worked out…

I love this. You see how I don’t have to write that many more words a day to take four weeks off? I only have to come up with 144 more words four days a week. The average time it takes me to write 250 words is 15 minutes as long as I don’t have interruptions. This is still a doable goal.

That gives me four weeks off. Real life has just been factored into my plan. Now I’m buffered, and I won’t get behind on my plan. This proves that a small change can still yield the results you are looking for. So I encourage you to experiment with your own plan.

Time will tell if this strategy will work for the long term, but already, it makes the task of writing six books a year less daunting. Let me know if you give something like this a try or if you have a business plan that works for you.