TRANSFORM YOUR WRITING FROM A PART-TIME HOBBY INTO A THRIVING BUSINESS

The end of the year is fast approaching, or, more importantly, the beggining of a new year is fast approaching. And so this is a perfect time to not only make a New Year's resolution, but to create a truly remarkable business plan for your writing, and stick to it.

To make your writing a success, you have to stop thinking about it as something you do in your spare time. You have to systematically plan your writing time into your life and then do it.

But first you need to be absolutely sure of what you're trying to achieve. And this will involve writing out a complete business plan.

For instance; say your ultimate goal for your writing is to work as a full-time self published novelist.

This might seem straight forward at first and you might think that all you have to do is sit down and write books.

But there is more to it than that because you not only have to write books, you have to sell them too, so that will involve creating a cover, having a website/place to sell your books and having a marketing plan.

They say that marketing a book begins way before you actually write it. A book needs to be "pre-sold" to a hungry market of avid readers.

So before you even write your first book you need to know how to start announcing it's arrival to everyone who will want to read it.

But how to do you do that?

Well you might start by reading the amazing book by John Locke called "How I Sold One Million Ebooks in Only 5 Months" where he actually talks about the exact system he used to make sure he had readers ready to buy his books before he published them.

But that's not all. To create a business plan that is guaranteed to work you not only have to know what you you need to do, but you have to know how you are going to find the time to get it all done. And by that I don't mean how you're going to accomplish the overall task of writing and selling books, but how you're going to manage the time to do each and every step of it.

For instance, I have bought a big new diary ready for next year. The diary has a whole page for every day and each day is marked out down the left hand side in hours. Having this hour-by-hour map of my time every day and what I'll be working on and when, helps me manage my time really efficiently.

How to begin your writing plan.

Your business plan for your writing needs to start with a 3-5 year plan of what you want to achieve in this time. And you need to be very clear about this because this is the goal you will be working towards for a long time.

Then you need to look at your plan for the next 12 months and decide how you're going to proceed and the exact steps you need to take on a day-to-day, month-to-month basis.

So once you know your 3 to 5 year goal, start looking at your immediate one year tasks.

What are you going to do to build your business?

How much money will you invest?

How will you outsource the non-important/non-writing jobs?

Which ebooks, print books, and audio books do you plan to buy to help you?

Are you going to take a course?

Just stop being nervous and be bold with your plans. Know exactly what you want to achieve and go for it.

Because if you don't start treating your writing as a business, it will stay as a hobby, or worse; a "what if...?"

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