How to create a Business Plan for your Self-Publishing Career

For Authors

Last week, we talked about how treating your writing like a business is the key to moving from hobbyist to “real writer.” The next step is to lay the foundation for that business with a clear and workable plan. A business plan might sound intimidating, but when you break it into simple parts it becomes a practical and powerful tool for guiding your self-publishing career.

In today’s blog, Ginger shares the three principles of a successful author business: process, leverage, and distribution. Through clear explanations and real-world examples, he shows what each principle means and how to apply it to your own goals. Whether you want to write full time or simply reach more readers, following this path can help turn your creative work into a profitable and sustainable venture while setting you on the road to building your author empire.

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Last week, I wrote about how the difference between being a successful self-published author and somebody who writes and self-publishes as a hobby is whether or not you’ve made a commitment to treating your writing like a business.

This week, I’m going to cover the foundation of any successful business: a business plan.

For a lot of self published writers, coming up with a business plan is a hugely intimidating process, so today I wanted to break down a business plan for your writing, so that you actually understand what the concept of your writing-as-a-business actually is.

This isn’t the sort of business plan that you could take into a venture capital firm and get a loan for, but it is the foundation you’d need if you were ever actually going to do that.

The concept behind this plan is one I read about in a self-published book by a very interesting Australian writer by the name of Greg Holman, who wrote a fictionalized story inspired by his own experiences as a highly successful businessman.

Amidst the globe-trotting tale of an entrepreneur struggling with broken relationships, alcoholism, and blackmail, Greg also laid out the three essentials of every successful business and this wisdom has stuck with me ever since.

Those principles are:

• Process
• Leverage
• Distribution.

If you have a system in place to cover each of those principles, you have the potential for a successful business no matter what the business is—whether it’s flipping furniture you buy at the flea market for profit or writing and self-publishing books.

Here’s what each of these foundations mean to your business.

Process

Process is the action of actually doing whatever it is at the core of your business.

If you’re a self-published author, that would be writing and self-publishing books. This means that the first part of your business plan should be explaining the process of writing and publishing your books.

You want to write a literal checklist here. This could include how long to spend planning and brainstorming your next book, then how you’ll actually spend writing the first draft—providing a specific plan for WHEN you are going to find time to write and how much you could REALISTICALLY write per day (spoiler alert, the answer is 2,000 words.)

Next, you’ll need to outline your plan for editing the first revision, any subsequent revisions, and finally running this mostly completed manuscript past an editor (or more than one) and a proofreader.

And we’re not finished yet!

Then, you’ll have to lay out the digital and print versions of your book ready for publication, get a cover designed, write your blurb, actually create your “product” as a digital ebook and print-ready PDF, and then pass it on to beta readers should you choose to use them.

Next, you’ll have to get it out to an advanced reading copy (ARC) team, and finally hit “publish” on the whole thing, all coordinated with your marketing efforts.

It’s a lot of work! And some of it is quite technical, too. However, these are the stages you need your books to go through before they’re ready for sale. As I said before: Your book is a product, no different to an end-table or a taco. There’s an assembly line it has to go through before it becomes a marketable product, and you need to map out these stages so you can go through them methodically one-by-one.

You may have to hire experts to complete some of these stages, like a cover designer or an editor (or more). You might need to invest money to access an audience of beta readers or an advanced reader copy service. As this is a business plan, you need to identify and factor in these costs.

This stage can actually be a wake-up call to some would-be authors, because these costs can add up into hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars. But investment is the birthplace of all successful businesses, and before you get to experience the satisfaction of feeling like a REAL writer, you’ll need to invest the money in running a REAL business.

Leverage

The second stage is leverage, which is WHY people would want whatever it is your business does. The concept comes from physics, in which a lever multiplies the force that is applied to it. In a business, leverage does the same thing—providing a tool which can multiply a product’s potential to be financially successful.

So, let’s look at your books. WHY would anybody buy them? What leverage do you have?

This is a deep, esoteric, but essential journey of reflection for every writer to go through.

The problem with writing books in 2025 is that the “wild west” of Kindle Direct Publishing is over. We’ve long past the era in which you could write and self-publish a book and have a reasonable chance of it being organically discovered by readers.

Today, you have to have a real “hook” with your book for it to be successful, one that means that anybody arriving on the product page of your book finds it so compelling that they’ll consider paying good money for it.

There are many forms of leverage for your book. Somebody might buy it because you’ve made a connection with them on social media and they want to “buy you a pint” by clicking the Buy Now button.

Alternatively, you could write under a pen name but have a book that’s really well written, really well reviewed, and perfectly targeted towards a very specific book-buying audience on Amazon.

If you write a paranormal romance book with friends-to-lovers and secret baby tropes, paired with a really professional cover and a killer blurb and story concept, your leverage might be producing a product for an audience who love those tropes and read two or three books a week. Even though they’re not familiar with you as an author, they like the presentation of your book enough to pick it out from the digital bookshelves in preference to the many other books they could have bought.

That’s what leverage is—and whatever your “thing” is, you need to have a thing to be successful.

In terms of a business, plan, leverage is where you need to identify a realistic model of the audience who might buy your book, and provide a solid reason for why that audience will be interested enough in the book to give you their money.

Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, your book needs an “angle.”

This is why traditional publishers are so keen to get celebrities and public figures to write a book for them. They know that the celebrity has a built-in audience, and that’s their “leverage.” The celebrity is so famous that they can have a reasonable expectation that the money they invest in publishing their book will sell enough copies to make a profit.

And leverage might extend beyond the money raised by selling your book. If you’re a consultant or run a business, writing and self-publishing a non-fiction book about a relevant topic and then investing money to get a ton of great reviews and a one-time “best-seller” ranking is “leverage” because you can use it to help find leads for your business and elevate your perception in your industry.

If that’s you, royalties aren’t even how you need to worry about recouping your money.

In any event, your leverage needs to demonstrate why people will be interested in buying your book, even if it’s not enough of them to recoup the money you invest in publishing it.

I mean, profit is great! But many traditional businesses have the expectation of not running at a profit for two years or more, and their leverage is the work they do building a customer base who’ll keep returning and buying from them frequently enough to turn their business profitable.

Your leverage might require a similar timeframe, and as an author, it’s a perfectly acceptable business plan to write and self-publish three books and not expect to see a profit from any of them. You just need to sell enough copies of them to start building an audience that will eventually be large enough to make every new book you publish profitable.

Nick Stephenson talks about how growing an audience of 10,000 readers is enough to have a reasonable expectation of earning six-figures from your writing business. So, even if your “thing” isn’t compelling enough to leapfrog years of business development, it’s enough to keep growing your audience of readers with each new book you publish until you finally reach that number.

If you’re an ecommerce whiz, advertising and marketing could be your leverage in reaching a large enough audience to start turning a profit. If your book’s “thing” can turn enough of them into customers, you can hit profitability.

The difference between treating writing like a business and writing as a hobby is delivering a product that people actually want. Your books shouldn’t be like the Field of Dreams. “If I self-publish it, the readers will come” is not an effective business strategy. If you want to be a real writer, you need to have a real reason for people to buy your books. That’s your leverage.

Distribution

Distribution is the final step, which is simply how you’ll put your product into the hands of paying customers.

This is actually easier for self-published authors than most small businesses. You don’t need to open a storefront or buy inventory. You can self-publish your books on Amazon in a matter of hours and start selling them the moment they’re approved.

However, now that you’re treating writing as a business, you might want to look at distribution more strategically. Is Amazon your best option? Do you go wide, or earn those KU royalties by remaining exclusive to Amazon? Or do you want to sell directly?

In that case, you‘ll have to build a landing page, and a Shopify store, and build a sales funnel that includes delivery (or “distribution” hence why this part is called distribution) of your books.

Do you want to sell print copies of your books? Are you going to use Amazon’s print on demand service, or another platform like Ingram Sparks?

Are you going to try and approach bookstores to get print copies of your books there? How are you going to provide those print copies? What cost is attached to them?

Just like you have costs incurred in the process stage, you have costs in the distribution stage if you want your books to be available in places where your audience can buy them.

And there’s your business plan!

Process, Leverage, and Distribution

If you have a pretty good grasp on each of those three foundations, then having them laid out in a business plan will be your roadmap for building your author empire.

Ultimately, that’s all that stands between treating your writing like a business or just writing as a hobby. And like many businesses, you don’t even need to be making a profit from it, at least not to begin with.

But if you’re running a business, you want it to be successful, and ultimately earning money from your writing is what I define as “successful” self publishing. And the good news is that there’s no reason why you can’t make a profit as a self-published author.

Start with writing your business plan, then follow-up by actually completing the steps you’ve outlined. Accept that there’ll be costs incurred. And sure, you’ll probably screw up and lose money in the beginning, and then again, and again, until suddenly you don’t.

Sooner or later (and I hope it’s sooner for you) you’ll start to see a profit, and then you’ll figure out how to have a more efficient process, better leverage, and more effective distribution, and then you can actually publish a book and have reasonable confidence that enough people will choose to buy it to make the whole thing profitable.

And whether that profit is enough to buy a dinner out, or it becomes a full time income, there’s something incredibly satisfying about really earning money from your writing.

And in my mind, that’s an important part of what makes me feel like a “real” writer.

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