Joanna Penn - Your Author Business Plan: Take Your Author Career to the Next Level

Y ou are an author.

You turn ideas into reality in the shape of a book. You turn the thoughts in your head into valuable intellectual property assets. You understand how powerful the written word can be.

This book will help you use your words to create a business plan to take your writing career to the next level whatever that means for your situation.

Im Joanna Penn and in 2009, I created a business plan for what became The Creative Penn Limited, a multi-six-figure company with books at its heart. Im an award-nominated New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller and dark fantasy author as J.F. Penn, and I also write non-fiction for authors. Im an award-winning podcaster with two shows, The Creative Penn and Books and Travel, and an international professional speaker.

My business has multiple streams of income, including books in different formats in multiple stores, and Ive sold copies in 159 countries. I also have online courses, affiliate income, podcast sponsorship and Patreon, among others.

But it wasnt always like this.

I started out with one book, no audience, and no experience in publishing or online sales and marketing. But I wrote a plan for my creative and financial future and took action on my ideas, learning the necessary skills along the way. Since then, Ive continued to work toward those original goals and in 2011, I left my corporate job to become a full-time author-entrepreneur. Ive never gone back and I love my creative, entrepreneurial life.

In this book, Ill guide you through the process of creating a business plan that will help you achieve your creative and financial goals.

Its relevant for fiction and non-fiction authors, as well as those who want to include other products, services, and income streams. Its also applicable whether youre just starting out or if you already have a mature author business. A plan helps at any stage of the journey.

This book follows the structure of the business plan so you can focus on each section in turn as you go through.

Part 1 covers your business summary and author brand, taking you through the process of deciding the overall direction for what you want to achieve and who you want to serve.

Part 2 goes into the production process around your writing, publishing and licensing, products and services.

Part 3 covers your marketing strategy and author ecosystem.

Part 4 goes into the financial side of your business, from mindset to revenue and costs, as well as paying yourself now and into the future.

The final chapter will give you a framework for simplifying your plan and turning it into achievable steps across a chosen timeline.

In each section, I give examples from my own business plan and there are questions for you to answer and resources that might help along the way.

You can find templates and a workbook to download and fill in and more resources at:

www.TheCreativePenn.com/yourplan

There is also a Companion Workbook available in print with all the questions so you can write in that if you prefer.

Importantly, this book doesnt go into detail on how to do the specific topics, for example, how to self-publish a book, or how to do content marketing. I cover that in my other Books for Authors.

If you already have my previous business book, Business for Authors, this is a rewritten and updated sub-set of that material, focusing on the specifics of a plan as opposed to everything involved in running a business. This book acts as a companion as well as a more recent update to my own author journey. It will help you bring it all together into a coherent plan that you can use to take your author business into the future.

Lets get into the details.

Note: There are affiliate links within this book to products and services that I recommend and use personally. This means that I receive a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you, and in some cases, you may receive a discount for using my link. I only recommend products and services that I believe are great for authors, so I hope you find them useful.

A business plan might seem like a dry, soulless document the complete opposite to the creative words that you pour onto the page for your books. But think again.

Look around you. People working in some kind of business created much of what you see. Business creates jobs and meaningful work. It fuels income and enables money to flow between people. It turns ideas into reality.

If you can reframe business as creative, then you can also reframe your business plan that way. You are actively shaping your future writing career, and what could be more creative than that!

You might think you know what you want to achieve and how to do that, but when you try to write it down, you may well discover that your thought process is fuzzy and you havent quite worked out what you want to say. That happens with our books, and will likely happen with your business plan, but the very act of writing it down will help make it clearer.

Youll discover where youre being over-ambitious, or over-complicating things, or trying to do too much based on the time you have. Youll also find aspects that will challenge you and help you face the fears that are part of every creative life.

Youll also consider the reasons behind what you want. So often we plow ahead into busy tasks and getting things done without ensuring that our actions will lead us to an endpoint we want to pursue.

Writing your plan down will also help you to turn it into reality, because you will have to articulate what you want to achieve. As you go through this book, dont just answer the questions in your head. Write them down and turn your plan into words. You might be surprised by what you find.

Your business plan will have a section on the books youre going to write, but it wont detail how you will actually write them. It will have a section on publishing, but it wont include the steps for how to publish a book.

Your plan should be high-level. Think of yourself physically rising high above and looking down on your author business as it is now and where you want it to be in the future. You cant see all the detail from high up, but you can see more strategically than if youre down in the weeds.