Unfortunately, as important as it is to create at least a basic marketing plan, surprisingly, it’s something few people actually do. Perhaps this is why marketing has gotten a reputation for being such a hassle. The Whole Artist approach really depends on it though. Since you’ll be tackling marketing tasks a little at a time, often with gaps in between, it’s essential you’re able to return back to the Basic Sequence right where you left off. This is the whole trick in balancing your creative life with marketing your book.

So, while it’s true that committing things in a document ahead of time makes everything a lot easier later on, when doing so you’ll need to take this first step slowly and carefully. A gentle warning: since you’ll be giving all your attention to what’s ahead, it’s only natural to over-plan and bulk up your marketing plan with more items than you’re actually able to accomplish.

To help calibrate your own expectations, the first two things we like to ask authors are:

Question 1: “What are your goals?”

Goal-setting is itself a kind of dark art. We all love being ambitious. We strive towards aspiration with a sense of dedication to our futures. But when it comes to the Whole Artist way of doing things, we ask that you step back for a minute and think things through. This is not a fitness class, a financial exercise, or even a career plan. The creative life is different. By setting goals in the context of this course, you are in effect making a kind of contract with yourself, one that must fit into other aspects of your life.

We discovered that people have longer term success in marketing by setting relatively modest goals and properly achieving them instead of setting the bar too high and walking away with a sense of failure. None of this is surprising or original. But we want to remind you of it early in the process anyway. Keeping yourself creative means staying positive and open-minded. The more we fail at our self-contracts, the more depleted and shut down we get. Being a Whole Artist above all else means being fair and kind to yourself.

Depending on where you are in your writing career or other activities in your life, some sample goals might be: “Sell more books than my last release,” or “Find others who have lived through my story,” or even “Pivot my book content into an online course or seminar as a source of revenue.”

Sometimes goals are largely creative. We’ve seen non-fiction authors trying their hand at writing their first novel with unexpectedly positive results. It allowed them to have conversations different from those they’d normally have within their traditional spheres.

We do want to remind you that goals can and do change mid-stream. Your creativity always comes first. If you find you need to retune your goals to keep your head clear, by all means do so.

Question 2: “How much time do you have to spend on this plan on a week–to-week basis?”

When it comes to estimating time spent executing your marketing plan, you’ll need to be incredibly self-effacing and humble. We’re specifically not saying “realistic.” That’s a phantom word that has almost no tractable meaning. No, we ask you to be particularly modest in your estimate. Once you fall off your schedule it’s too easy to walk away from the whole venture altogether. That’s not what being a Whole Artist is about. We want you to succeed, and to experience that success a little at a time along the way.

We can’t say for certain how much time you’ll need to work through your plan on a week-by-week basis, but unless you’ve got nothing else going on (like kids, parents, a day job, and oh, right, your next book), it’s probably going to be tough to eke out more than three or four hours per week. That’s actually a perfect amount of time to commit. If you stick at this pace, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how much you get done as the weeks progress. Make a note at the top of your marketing plan indicating the amount of effort you'll spend each week.

This is a great time to talk about getting help. Many of our clients have pretty aggressive marketing goals and need certain things accomplished with hard date windows (like TV or podcast appearances, conference lectures, etc). If you find yourself in a situation like this, you’ll want to seriously consider hiring a contractor or firm to do these tasks for you. We can’t stress this enough: our goal in this course is to help you become a Whole Artist, and that means managing any burden in your marketing life that might interfere with your creative output.