If you want to be an author, and your goal is to make money publishing your work, you need a business plan. For lots of writers, this is daunting. After all, your main expense is, essentially, your time. Except anyone who has spent hundreds of hours transcribing their soul into words and taken the step the make it available to world will tell you: writing is the easy part. Successful self-publishing (and traditional publishing) requires a strategy, and strategy requires research and planning. Of course, writing an author business plan looks different than writing a plan for, say, a neighborhood bakery, or a tech start-up, or a widget manufacturer. So where do you start?

The Author's Guide: Writing Your Business Plan walks you through each step of the process and outlines what kinds of questions you need to ask yourself, resources for quality research, and examples of the logic and math you can apply to your specific situation. (I know: whoever told us there would be no math lied!) Each chapter is designed to help you define the critical elements of your independent publishing business and help you determine where to focus your limited time and resources.

• Chapter 1: What Will You Sell? Wherein we explore the wide world of book genres, BISAC codes, and formats.

• Chapter 2: Where Will You Sell It? Wherein we discuss the places people purchase books.

• Chapter 3: Who Are You? Wherein we call our therapists and discuss what makes us unique.

• Chapter 4: Business Setup Wherein we explore all the really boring but necessary stuff like LLCs and EINs and other alphabet soup of business ownership.

• Chapter 5: Staff Wherein we remind ourselves that "staff" can apply to anyone who helps us on our journey to publication.

• Chapter 6: Products Wherein we set SMART goals for publishing and define the content we will sell and the timeline in which we will produce and sell it. (Get your calculators out!)

• Chapter 7: Market Analysis Wherein we get to know our comp authors and our ideal reader.

• Chapter 8: Marketing/Sales Strategy Wherein we get some hard advice about the side of publishing that every author hates.

After you've read our guide to writing a business plan for authors, the murky waters of independent publishing will be...less murky. You'll have goals (SMART ones!), action steps, and hopefully the confidence to pursue your passion.