A business plan isn’t going to save you from the author avalanche.

What you need is a System.

That first sentence is basically the lesson I had to learn the hard way. Stick with me. I’ll come back to the second sentence in a bit, but first I want to tell a story: 

For five years, our indie author businesses were defined by daily social media posting, ad hoc marketing efforts, rag-tag launches, and the nagging guilt of forgetting to send out newsletters for weeks (our as in my writing group and me). Yet, this indie writing model is the one everyone adopts. Plan and calendar for writing. Plan and calendar for business. Plan and calendar for social media. Plan and calendar for newsletters. Everything came with its own plan and calendar. My writing group and I tried to make this model work, but keeping up proved impossible. Guess what lost out? Writing.

I’d had it! All I wanted was to stop the struggle and to make my author business run efficiently and effectively. So last winter I opened a blank document, typed “Author Business Plan,” and thought I was finally about to get my arms around this whole author business thing. (Picture me now laughing.)

A business plans feel like maturity. Like you’re finally “doing it right.” You’re sitting there with your headings and your goals and your neat bullet points, and your brain goes, “Ah. Control.” I was so proud of my business plan that I shared it with my writing group. And then I tried implementing it.

And it didn’t work. 

It was a great business plan. It had all the classic stuff. Mission statement. Big goals. A vibe. But it didn’t tell me how to run the week. Or the month. Or what to do when I was tired, behind, and still wanted to be a decent human with a life outside my keyboard.

So I tried again. And again. After months of one iteration right after the next, my writing group just nodded and smiled when I said “this is it” as I sent out the current version. I was undaunted, however. Well, I looked more obsessively crazed than anything else. For days I wouldn’t wash my hair or leave the house. My husband needed to coax me to the grocery store or a café as if I were some kind of feral animal. 

Here’s the thing. I could not afford for this not to work. I’d been at self-publishing for five years and kept butting my head up against the same obstacles (See paragraph 4). And I just couldn’t continue with the same indie author business model everyone’s been using for the last twenty years. I had to find a better way

I’m a retired teacher. Chaos is not acceptable. And yet my early publishing years felt like standing at the bottom of a mountain while the Author Avalanche kept breaking loose upon me. New apps. New courses. New “must-do” tactics. Plus, everything mentioned in paragraph 4.

WHY BUSINESS PLANS FEEL COMFORTING AND WHY THEY FAIL WRITERS

A plan is great at answering the “what” and the “when.” Publish two books this year. Grow the list. Launch a book in Q3. All reasonable. But when you’re staring at your week and thinking, “Do I write chapter twelve or draft a newsletter or learn yet another platform because everyone’s yelling about it,” the plan just stares back at you. For most writers, a business plan turns into a fancy document that doesn’t touch the daily chaos. It’s too removed from the real friction points. A plan loves the future. But writing needs to happen now.

Writers get sold tactics. Not operating instructions. Don’t get me wrong. The indie space is full of smart people sharing strategies and tactics. A lot of it works. That’s part of the problem. Because you can always add one more thing. One more ad experiment. One more email sequence. One more “quick” content idea. And consider that AI is changing the digital landscape minute by minute. That’s how the avalanche builds. Not from one huge rock. From constant little additions. A plan doesn’t handle the real constraints: time and energy. 

And this is the part most business templates ignore. You’re an indie author, a one-person enterprise creating something complex like a novel, not a mid-sized company with departments. You’re a single nervous system. Most of the time, writers don’t fail because they lack ambition. They fail because they try to run ten separate “plans” simultaneously. A newsletter plan. A social plan. A release plan. A reader magnet plan. A launch plan. And each plan comes with its own calendar, its own metrics, its own guilt.

That’s not strategy. That’s self-inflicted overload.

Then during one of those business plan iteration sessions it hit me: What I needed was a System to contain and manage my author business. (I told you I’d come back to this. Thanks for sticking with me.)

PLAN VERSUS SYSTEM AND WHY THE DIFFERENCE CHANGES EVERYTHING

What you need is a System.

Here’s what I mean. A plan is a roadmap for a specific outcome. It’s the what and when. A system is the ongoing process that makes progress inevitable. It’s the how. It’s habits. Routines. Defaults. Feedback loops. The stuff that keeps working even when you’re not “feeling it.”

Think of a plan like a single map to one destination. A system is a ship. It can handle weather. It can reroute. It can keep moving even when your original path gets messy. Your author business is the ship. You’re the captain.

And I know, “systems” can sound cold or corporate. I’m not asking you to turn your creative life into a boardroom. I’m asking you to stop relying on willpower and vague motivation as the glue holding your business together.

Plans assume stable conditions. Writers don’t get those. Life happens. Kids get sick. Day jobs explode. You draft a book that turns into a swamp. Social platforms change the rules again. Your ads tank for reasons you can’t identify. A system doesn’t prevent any of that. It just gives you a way to keep moving without reinventing your approach every time something shifts.

A system tells you what to do when you don’t know what to do. This is the real payoff. It’s not “being organized.” It’s decision relief.

You stop asking, “What should I do today to be a successful author?” (That question will eat you alive.) And you start asking, “What does my system say is next?” Even better, you can be tired and still move. Tired writers need systems. Energetic writers can get away with chaos longer. But it catches up eventually.

So I started looking at the whole indie author business differently. And I started asking other writers questions like “How do you organize your author business?” The responses: uhm, writing, publishing, uhm, social media, newsletters, ads, and then finally a shoulder shrug. What about all the rest? Where do you put your reader community? And what about author branding?

I stepped back and realized most writers either had only a few organizing categories or they had almost two dozen, all acting independently and needing their own plans. If your current plans require you to check five social media platforms, tweak ads, half-write a newsletter, and then draft a scene all in a single day but you find yourself unable to accomplish any one thing meaningfully, you’re not lazy. You’re scattered. Different problem.

A small reality check about attention and output. Most writers underestimate how much context switching costs. You can feel productive bouncing between tasks. But you’re paying a “tax” every time your brain changes modes. There’s research showing that frequent interruptions can substantially increase the time it takes to complete tasks. One often-cited finding is that interrupted work can take significantly longer to finish than uninterrupted work. The exact numbers vary by study and setting, but the pattern is consistent: interruptions are expensive. American Psychological Association

Then it happened during one of my business plan iterations. Everything fell into place like a Rube Goldberg machine—dominoes neatly collapsing onto one another, little balls falling into cups, all the way to the final event springing forth the idea that I needed to fix my author business with Systems. That’s where the CEO Author Business System approach came from. Not from wanting to sound fancy. From wanting something that functioned on regular days, not just on “perfect” days. I realized my business needed to be contained with seven subsystems, and these subsystems worked together as a single, whole System to run my author business so that I no longer felt the author avalanche.

Now, I’m not going to hand you a cute “morning routine” and call it a day. Systems are personal. They have to match your production pace, your tolerance for marketing, and your life constraints. And while the CEO Author Business System lays out very specific systems for you to follow, it also has built-in flexibility. 

Let’s go over some FAQs:

Does the CEO Author Business System require me to get up at 4AM?

No. Unless you want to. 

What if I’m a slow writer and the system feels like pressure?

Then the system is wrong. A real system should reduce pressure, not add it. The CEO Author Business System has a built in Guilt-Free Writing Schedule model.

How do I stop daily social media posting from taking over my writing time?

Well, just stop doing that. In the CEO Author Business System, we teach the idea of containers that have specific time blocks and purposes. No more “I’ll just pop into Insta for a minute,” which turns into three hours of doom-scrolling and comparing yourself to people who look like they never have to clean a bathroom. If social supports your goals, groovy. If it mainly spikes your anxiety, we’re got a better solution.

Here’s the takeaway from the CEO Author Business System I want you to steal and use this week:

Make a list of all your business chores—your accounting, office housekeeping, digital housekeeping. Next, pick one day a month where you spend two to four hours taking care of these author business maintenance issues. You won’t do any writing, editing, or publishing on this day. We have a special name for this day: the CEO DAY. There's a strong belief here in separating the act of book creation from author business administration. 

You’ve got the power to stop the author avalanche today. 

If you’re ready for “Systems over struggling,” take a look at the CEO Author Business System.