What’s required to create a solid book writing plan? What do you need to know to make sure that you can actually execute the plan that you make? Planning isn’t always easy, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. If you’re ready to make a writing plan or you’re feeling discouraged about the plan you have, let me help you improve your planning skills by focusing on three essential pillars. Let’s get into it.

Welcome to Academic Book Writing Simplified. I’m your host, Jane Joanne Jones, a writing coach and developmental editor who’s here to give you some tough love about the way you write. This podcast is for women and non-binary scholars in academia who are writing academic books but feel as if the process is a little or a lot like a mystery. If you’re ready to trade your confusion and frustration for ease, clarity, and purpose, you’re in the right place. Let’s head into today’s episode.

Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s episode of Academic Book Writing Simplified. I’m your host, Jane Joanne Jones.

We’re going to discuss the three pillars of successful book planning.

One issue I see with book writers is that they believe thinking through the logistics of writing a book is going to be so overwhelming that they shut down and instead write in a reactive way, meaning that they don’t proactively consider what they need to do and when they should do it. Instead, they approach every week and every writing session with a vague sense of what they should be working on, but then spend their time either doing work that doesn’t really move the needle or recalibrating their plan over and over and over because it really wasn’t that helpful to begin with. Does that sound familiar?

Well, what I’m going to do today is discuss the three pillars of successful book planning, from broad to most specific. You can tackle all three pillars at once or start working on improving your skills in one pillar at a time. But I promise you, if you start doing this work, your planning will be much more helpful and rewarding for you.

So let’s start with pillar number one, which is project management.

For our purposes, project management requires you to understand the scope of the project, the milestones you’ll establish to track your progress, and the timeline you should stick to in order to achieve your goal — which, for us, is writing a book and submitting it.

It also includes an accounting of any time-related resources you’ll have, like sabbaticals or course releases, breaks, and so forth. In my opinion, you should start with this pillar because it informs the other pillars.

The first and most important question is: when do I have to submit this book to the publisher?
The second most important question is: how much time until I reach that date?

Project management also includes an assessment of what needs to be done so you can understand the scope of the project. Is there still outstanding empirical research you must complete? And is there secondary literature you must read? How many chapters are already drafted? Do you still need to write a book proposal?

Putting the answers to all of these questions in one document can help you have an easy reference guide to assess the work required to get your book done on time.

Let’s move on to pillar number two, which is calendar management.

Here, you look at your actual calendar and figure out when you’re going to work on your book. You can start at a broad level with, for instance, looking at academic terms. What terms provide you with more time to work? Maybe there are some terms where you teach less. Then you can get into specific months or weeks.

You can account for travel, conferences, holidays, and so forth. This will help you understand the ebbs and flows of your book writing and prevent you from making grand plans during a time where you just aren’t available to write your book.

So, for instance, don’t set a milestone of, “I’m going to have this book proposal done by, for instance, October 17th,” not realizing that the week before is when midterms are being graded. Right? You suddenly put yourself in a situation where you’re probably not going to be able to do both.

Which is why we look to the long term when we’re planning instead of only focusing on the day-by-day or two weeks at a time. We want to have that longer perspective so that we don’t unintentionally set ourselves up for failure.

So if you know, “I’m going on vacation,” or, “my kid’s out of school this week,” it’s probably not going to be the best writing week for you. So you really want to be attentive to your calendar  and plan accordingly.

You can also be proactive this way and, you know, set aside certain weeks where you’re like, “No, this is a week I’m going to work on my book. I’m not going to accept any invitations or talks or extra meetings that week because that’s a book week.” Okay?

Really, understanding your calendar can help you with boundaries — which is something I have spoken about on this podcast at length — and also making sure that you make the most of the time you have because your writing time is precious. And doing a little advanced planning means that you will be able to protect more of it.

Okay, so once you understand your calendar — and again, just a little tip for this one — a lot of people who I work with get one of those big, like, on-the-wall year calendars, so you can see a whole year at one time. Right?

I know some of us are very digital. I am not one of them. I’m a Luddite. But having a big calendar like this can help you do a literal year-at-a-glance and highlight, you know, block off, color-code certain weeks as book weeks and certain weeks where — you know — there are weeks where you just won’t get into the book.

And that visual can help you understand:
Number one — am I giving myself enough time?
And number two — how is that time distributed over the course of the year?

All right, let’s go to our third and final pillar, which is task management.

This is where you break your writing goals or milestones into actionable steps. For instance, you are going to take your goal of “finish this chapter by October 1st” and break it down into actions.

Break it down by section. You can break it down by your plan to incorporate evidence in certain places. You can break it down by your outline. Right? Like: I’m going to do this point on my outline. I’m going to write a paragraph about this. Going to write another paragraph about this. Right?

The important thing is that you break it down.

This is something we spend quite a bit of time on in my program Book Brilliance. The reason we do that is because you want to get as specific as possible where you can. Because there are definitely going to be some things that are really hard to quantify, like thinking through ideas, developing frameworks, deciding how to revise and respond to feedback. All those things are going to be hard to quantify. Right? Hard to tell when you’re done.

Right? When you’re revising in response to feedback, you might be saying, “How do I know when I’m done? How do I know the argument is strong enough now?” Right?

It’s something that you get better at over time, but it’s hard to plan for in advance. It’s kind of like, “I just know when it’s done,” or, “I know where I’ve reached the point where I’ve done everything I intellectually can and I have to move on from it.”

But you may not know that in advance. And it’s because you don’t know that in advance, it’s so important to be ruthless about the tasks that you can quantify and make discrete more easily — because you’re clearing up time and executive function to work on those less quantifiable tasks.

So you want to make sure that you have your tasks on lock. Right? And that might mean making yourself a task list, having an idea of recurring tasks. Because there are things we have to do for every chapter, every section. Right?

Like, we know we have to incorporate evidence in every chapter. We know that we have to maybe define certain concepts at certain points in the book. Right?

So being ruthless about tasks that you can quantify and make discrete more easily is going to help you with your plan in the short and long term.

Okay, so here’s your homework.

Ask yourself: where can you improve your skills within each pillar?

For instance, maybe you’re really good on the calendar, but making those tasks is tricky for you. So that might be where you decide to focus your attention.

Or there might be a pillar that is most urgent for you to attend to.

For instance, you might have to go back to project management and say, “If this book is due in two months, can I still do everything I set out to do? Do I need to ask for an extension? Or do I need to make some hard choices about what to cut?” So you’d be going back to the project management pillar.

Then get to work. Start working on your planning skills. Give yourself like a half an hour one day to review the plan you currently have and see where you can add more specificity or make things clearer for yourself.

All right. As always, thank you for listening, and I hope this was really helpful for you.

So if you’re listening to this when it’s published, it’s mid-July, which is a perfect time to reassess our plans because we’re just past the midway point of the year. So it’s a very good time to go in, see what’s working in our planning practice, and also revise the actual plan if necessary.

So you have a little work to do. And again, thank you so much for listening. I know you have a lot of options with podcasts, and I’m glad that you’re here listening to me. I hope you have a great day, and I will see you in the next episode. Take care.

Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode.

Remember, writing an academic book is challenging, but that doesn’t mean you have to overcomplicate it. If you liked what you heard in today’s episode, please leave a review. This helps get the word out about the podcast so more people will listen and we can continue the conversation.

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