It’s been a little over a year since I wrote up my first business plan for my writing career. It’s safe to say that I’ve gone pretty far off track from that, accelerating nearly every part of it, and completely doing away with the traditional publishing track I’d originally planned to follow concurrently with the self-pub track. Needless to say, though I’m happy with all the decisions I’ve made so far, it’s always a good idea to get it all down on paper (so to speak), and make sure I’m still heading in the right direction. It’s easy to get sidetracked when things are going a million miles an hour...

My goal is still to make enough money to write full-time. So that hasn’t changed. I’m not sure I’ll be able to make my projected 5-year deadline (4 years, now), but I’m still going to try. The main difference between my original plan and the new one is how I’m going to get to where I need to be.

Originally I’d planned to work in only two genres, and publish one novel every six months, and “play around with short stories for the holidays”. This year I’ve stuck to my goal of publishing a novel every six months, but I’ve also added the goal to publish a short story every other month in a second genre, and I’ve been working on a novel/novella in a third genre that I’m fairly certain will be ready to publish before Christmas. For 2011, I’ll have published:

• 3 romantic suspense novels

• 6 erotic novelettes

• 1 or 2 erotic short collections (depends on whether I split my niche works up or not)

• 1 thriller novel/novella (depending on word count when it’s done)

I’ll also have 2 more drafts half or more done.

Needless to say, I’ve been writing a lot more than I’d originally planned. I’ve also started a publishing project that will result in one flash fiction collection per month based on a prompt, the first to be released in October. I’m not sure how well those will do, but I’m interested in finding out. If nothing else, it will be good practice for me, and good exposure for my publishing company and the other authors I include.

The reason I’m able to put three novels out this year is that two this year were already drafted. So after this year, I’ll probably have to cut back to the original one novel every six months. But I fully plan to keep going with the erotic shorts and collections, and I think I’m going to play with writing shorter thrillers next year (novelette/novella length). I should feasibly be able to publish two novellas per year, I think, or three novelettes.

I was offering flat fee author services, but due to a lack of interest and time, have discontinued that. Instead, I’ll be publishing select authors under the BSB label, helping them with formatting, ISBN’s and whatever else they need, but in the end allowing the author to keep all profits (aside from a small percentage for the books sold directly from my BSB store). My way of helping out friends who want to self publish, but want a little help with set-up and marketing.

So that’s the current plan...and unless something changes drastically, I don’t see myself having any issues sticking to this schedule. The other part of the plan is a comprehensive pricing/marketing strategy, but that’s another post.

If you have a business plan, how’s it working for you? Have you revisited it recently? If you don’t have a plan...why not?

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