Why Author Planning Needs To Be Agile

By Vesper Young

TL;DR: Your author plans keep falling apart because you’re trying to build a skyscraper instead of a sustainable career.

At some point, you’ve probably tried to make a plan—a five-year author plan, a year-long author plan, maybe even a six-month one and it fell apart.

Why?

In business, project management has two major frameworks utilized depending on the type of project. The issue is, unless you study for some very boring certifications, you never learn what they are. This is going to be a quick and dirty version of the two main models and why your planning needs to fit your business.

Predictive: Works best for things with fixed steps, concrete processes and end goals, and a single development cycle. Like a skyscraper—you have to build the metal frame before the flooring goes in, you can’t put the windows on unless you’ve ordered the glass 6-12 months ago, and when the building is built, it’s built.

Agile: Works best for projects with fluid requirements where there is constant feedback and a need to pivot along with ongoing testing. (This model often utilizes tools like sprints, kanban boards, iterative approaches). It is especially useful when a project doesn’t have a “finished” state—like an author career.

In some ways, publishing a book feels predictive. You have concrete steps—write book, edit book, acquire cover, publish.

It’s a trap! Trying to fit an author’s career (which involves more than publishing one book) into a predictive model is a recipe for either failing to follow a plan—or worse, sticking to a plan at all costs that isn’t good for your business. For publishing, those steps don’t have to be in a specific order. You can write the blurb before or after the book; you can change the cover six months after launch. For many writers, it’s hard to plan to write 3,000 words a day for 6 months. You fall behind one week—now everything is thrown off! 

What do you do when something doesn’t go according to plan—maybe a backlist book goes viral (yay)! Writer’s block (no yay), Amazon breaks (that would never happen)? The answer seems obvious: pivot—promote that series! Take a break to recharge! Concentrate on writing the next book until things are fixed! That’s exactly what an agile framework is for, without requiring you to scrap some plan you lovingly journaled on January 1st. 

In our next post, we’ll discuss more concrete examples of how to apply an agile framework to your author career.

Vesper Young has been publishing since 2018 under an assortment of pseudonyms. In her corporate life, she leads several workstreams, making time and project management a matter of survival.