Planning Your Writing Career

Do you want to create a full-time writing career?  If the answer is yes, you're going to need a plan. 

To tell you the truth though, for the first three or four years I just wrote.  I had no idea where I was going.  I took some writing courses from the University of Oklahoma and  started writing short stories.  At that time many of the major magazines were publishing fiction.  I began bombarding them with short stories. A couple years after that most of these magazines stopped taking fiction. For this effort I received a lot of rejection slips. Perhaps, I thought, this wasn’t the genre I was meant to write.

Since I had no plan, I had no idea where to go, but luckily, I sold my first article to a local newspaper. I was off and running.  I sold articles to the San Francisco Chronicle, and several magazines. When I got to the business magazines, which took articles on individual businesses and how they increased volume, this seemed like a natural to me.  I decided then and there to specialize with these magazines.  I also concentrated on the recreational vehicle magazines and an occasional major magazine.  It worked.  I sold hundreds and hundreds of articles to the retail business magazines, became a field editor for several of the recreational vehicle magazines and Family Houseboating, and landed a few articles in such magazines as Family Circle, McCalls, Better Homes & Gardens, American home, and others. 

 That convinced me.  You see, without a plan for your writing career you will simply drift along and often at the end of a week you haven't actually written a thing. This is not good if you are ever going to sell your work or finish your novel. To help your career take off, you really need a Writer's Business Plan.

So what is a Writer's Business Plan?

A writer's business plan is a set of goals complete with deadlines. At its simplest, a writer’s business plan focuses on getting into print or it establishes your expected writing income for the year.  You may want to choose the magazines you would like to write for at times, but after you've achieved that you will want to set a target income

Setting Goals

State the Goal: So many writers say I want to be published.  Better to say, I'm going to write for Popular Mechanics this year.  That makes you concentrate on a magazine you like, rather than magazines in general.  In my own case, I started with magazines I liked to read.  This included the consumer magazines -- the RV publications, camping magazines -- the outdoors, and a few others.

I also discovered I liked the retail business magazines.  They ran articles on how a particular drugstore did a better merchandising job or how a home and auto retailer or an appliance store ran a successful advertising program.  I wrote many articles for these magazines from outdoor advertising, how to conduct a successful radio campaign, generational merchandising, how to cash in on the baby boomer market, and more.

I spent many days at the library looking through a publication called Standard Rate and Data.  This is a publication put out for the advertising industry, which lists all the magazines that take advertising and includes their advertising rates.  It's a perfect source for writers, since it lists thousands of business magazines, while Writers Digest only mentions a few hundred.

I used this method for years.  I would write down I'm going to write for the retail paint industry.  When I started there were several magazines in this category, and they were all fairly easy to hit.  I also targeted the RV industry by aiming for Trailer Life.  I hit that on the first try, and eventually sold them hundreds of articles

Make it Realistic and Achievable: Don't write "I want to write five novels this year.”  It's certainly not a realistic goal.  Write I'm going to finish the first draft of my novel this year.  This is a lot of work and you are going to need a lot of revisions, which takes time.  You don't want to send it out until you've written it as well as you can.  Be sure and consider the time it's going to take.

How Much Time?

Estimate how much time you can realistically spend on each of your goals in a week or a month. Remember if you have a full-time job you will be able to devote only about 20 hours a week to writing.

Of course, there's more to writing than just sitting down at the computer.  There's researching new markets, researching articles or fiction settings; composing query letters, writing first drafts of articles or fiction stories; editing second drafts; writing your novel; copywriting, etc.

Then you need to give each goal a deadline, for without a deadline there will be no impetus for you to finish each task. To set deadlines you need to take into account such factors as:

• Deadlines for article submissions (particularly for seasonal articles)
• Deadlines for when you want to have written the first three chapters of your novel or nonfiction book...
• deadlines for the number of words per week

You will also need to factor in time that you won't be able to use for writing, such as holidays. In the early days of my writing I used to take the typewriter with me thinking I would take some time to do a few pages.  It never happened.  I couldn't seem to give up hiking or boating or similar activities.  Ideally, you should also factor into your writing time to improve your craft; time to read writing books or newsletters, time to take a course . You need to invest time in your development as a writer.

Keeping track

After I starting using a PC I set up a special place on the hard drive to check how well I was doing.  I reviewed about every three months.  I gave each of the stated goals a number from 0 to10.  Anything over seven is progress.  Setting up a plan for your writing career is not difficult, but it will improve the amount you get done in a given length of time, and help you get the most out of your writing year.