Hey Reader,

If we were to hop on a call with you as a potential client, we’d start by asking you approximately a million questions to deeply understand your author business: Your goals, your untouched “wish list” projects, your “working and should be ramped up” list, your “hate doing” list, and so much more.

But today, we want to start with assessing your team.

Because accomplishing all of your big dreams while maintaining peace of mind is contingent on having the right support.

(Ready to skip right to the good stuff? TL;DR: We’re offering our next 10 9 author team audits—where we walk through all of this with you live—for free. Book yours now.)

In our work with authors, we’ve sussed out the four skills required for managing an author business: ideation, planning, execution, and evaluation.

When we speak with authors, we find that—without even realizing it—they rarely have all four areas locked in solidly across their team, which leads to frustration, wasted time, and missed opportunities.

And that’s why we start with your team—because gaps in ideation, planning, execution, and evaluation likely means you don’t have the right team members in place, or your team doesn’t have the right training and oversight.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

1. Ideation

These are all of the ideas—big and small—for how to make your author business more profitable, more sustainable, and more fun. It’s both the original ideas you and your team come up with, as well as ideas you’ve collected from observing what’s happening around you in the industry.

2. Planning

This is about strategically mapping out what’s happening in your biz, when, and by who. It’s designating timelines and the point people who will manage them, so you can have more calm and efficiency. This is short-term planning, like a social content calendar, but it’s also longer-term planning, like your yearly plan, broken down by month. It’s about locking in what is known, since things inevitably pop up last minute in any author business. (We’re looking at you, publishers who email the day before a cover reveal goes live 😆)

3. Execution

Execution is about following the plan in a timely manner, adjusting and adapting as needed, and proactively communicating progress along the way. It’s about creating exceptional work that creates results, without getting bogged down by perfectionism, procrastination, or tasks for the sake of doing tasks.

4. Evaluation

Locking in the functions of ideation, planning, and execution in your business will exponentially improve your team’s ability to run as a high-performing unit. But the skill of evaluation is what ensures your team and systems are consistently running the way you want them to. It’s about taking the time to reflect on a release, project, or launch—from the small, slightly inconvenient bumps to any major issues—to ensure the next round of execution is even smoother and more effective. It’s evaluating what worked, what didn’t work, and what could be done better next time, then incorporating those learnings into a documented process that everyone has access to.

We want to save some mystery for our live audit call, so we won’t share our guess on where you’re most likely missing skill sets on your team. (We’re not psychic; it’s just wildly predictable across 90% of author businesses!)

Have a quick think on the q’s above (don’t stress yourself out!)... then, book your live audit call with us.

In one hour, you’ll get more insight into the answers to these questions and what’s keeping you from those “I’d love to do that, but…” projects.

Cristina + Sara

P.S. Just out of curiosity…

We’d love to get a feel for where you are currently–because we want to make sure what we’re sending is a value add, not a time suck.

​
​