As anyone who has independently published knows, life as an indie author can feel pretty hectic, and far more like a circus act than most regular jobs. There are so many aspects to manage, and there’s so much more to do than simply write and revise your next book. 

When you scale your publishing business by creating and selling additional products, managing your own storefront, or working alongside other authors and creatives on new projects, your responsibilities grow with your income. But what does it take to run an expansive independent publishing business—especially one involving merchandise and physical inventory—without falling behind on your writing?

Although there is no silver bullet or one-size-fits-all answer to the question of a perfect daily schedule, there are a few commonalities demonstrated among authors operating at that level. Authors who are still in the early stages of their businesses can incorporate these elements to make balancing their writing with other responsibilities and scaling their work easier to manage. 

Key 1: Time Management

Time management is essential for those running a high-level business with many moving parts. LitRPG author Dakota Krout, who also manages a GameLit publishing company, Mountaindale Press, with his wife, Danielle, has built a specific and dedicated daily schedule. He starts his mornings before 5 a.m. to work out, then spends the rest of the morning with his family. Once the kids are off to school, he settles in and writes—or works on writing-centric and creative tasks—until 3 p.m. He spends the rest of his afternoon in meetings and on other business or administrative tasks.

Of course, every day isn’t exactly the same. “Negotiations don’t wait on my schedule,” Krout explains. He also attends multiple events each year, ensuring he has in-person time dedicated to meeting his fans and his Mountaindale Press authors, though the latter are strictly limited.

Krout’s schedule wasn’t always so clear, he says. Early on, he made a point to be available at any hour for his authors and employees, but it became overwhelming. Once he set boundaries to his schedule and applied office hours, he could better manage both his business and his personal health. 

“No one cares as much about your business as you do,” he says. The only person who might care more is the author’s spouse. “I’m very blessed to have my beautiful wife as my business partner,” Krout says, “and [to] have her be an incredibly competent business partner.” 

The call for boundaries is raised not only in the broader world of entrepreneurship but among the authors running successful businesses as well. To manage her time well enough to run a more complex author business, Sapphic Fantasy author Sacha Black echoes the famed inscription at ancient Delphi: Know thyself. “To operate at this level, you need to know yourself,” Black says. “It takes a lot of self-knowledge.”

That could be interpreted broadly, but Black specifically explains that you have to know what your skill sets are, what you should outsource, and, not the least of all, what things distract you or impede your writing. Perhaps that is social media, too many meetings, or working without a clear task and priority list, leading you to waste time on things that don’t move the needle. When you know what works and doesn’t work for you individually, you can make the best time management plan to keep you on track. 

Black, for example, understands how she writes best. “Some people write daily, and there are people like me, who binge-write an entire book in about three weeks,” she says. Writing every day simply doesn’t work for her, but she’s found an operational rhythm to guide her business and her team. That rhythm includes putting out three books a year. She spends about three weeks outlining her book, keeping her team aware of her progress along the way. “I have to prep my team because when I’m writing, I won’t do an awful lot of anything else.”

During those three weeks, Black implements cutoff times for requests for deliverables from her team, then provides what they need before she starts writing for the day. That focus applies to editing as well, but it becomes even stricter because once she begins editing, “I won’t make decisions about anything other than that manuscript,” she says. Although she recognizes it can be hard on them, she’s learned that’s what she has to do because beyond the choices she makes for her manuscript, she says, “I have no decision-making capacity left at all.” 

Even though she doesn’t write every day, her strict schedule means her writing and publishing cycles are steady. “I feel like I’m always somewhere in the process of writing,” Black says. She explains that she always has a book on the go, though sometimes they can take longer because she has a Kickstarter to fulfill, a warehouse to move, or school holidays to contend with. As the mother of a school-aged child, Black deliberately tries to schedule her drafting and editing to happen during the school terms. “Over the holidays, I do more physical stuff, so I’m going to take my kid, and he’s going to help me reorganize the warehouse,” she says. 

“To operate at this level, you need to know yourself.”
—Sacha Black

Aside from her larger writing rhythm and production schedule, Black says how she splits her daily business time depends on the day. “Usually, my best writing time is first thing in the morning or last thing at night.” For now, she has to get up with her child for school in the mornings, so she tends to write in the morning. But she’s willing to let her routine shift to match the season of life she’s in and her current priorities in life. As her child gets older, she expects she may return to being a night owl.

To stay on task, Black swears by body-doubling and writing in sprints. She sits with a partner in a Zoom room, and they do Pomodoro sprints, writing for twenty-five minutes, then chatting for five minutes. When she’s doing that, she won’t be doing anything else. All the other work has to come later. 

Krout’s and Black’s two models—writing every day or writing in a scheduled block around other responsibilities—represent a spectrum, but David Viergutz, Horror author and creator of ScareMail and Epistolary.com, represents yet another angle to daily business management and writing. “I’m an odd duck in that writing is second to everything else,” he says. 

For many authors, the goal of becoming a full-time author is, in part, to gain more daily writing hours. But that may not be the case when an author reaches the point of earning mid-six figures or more annually. Viergutz reminds us that writing alone doesn’t make money. He views writing as a form of product creation, not an income-generating activity on its own.

Viergutz doesn’t have a strictly divided or time-blocked schedule. Instead, he maintains steady operations in his business through prioritization. “For me, it’s health and family first, business second, then creative.”

After taking care of himself and his family each day, he heads to his warehouse to work on his business. But writing isn’t an afterthought for the Horror author. Instead, he explains that there is an overlap between his business and his creative work, and they end up blending together.

He also dedicates time each day to research. “I spend about an hour a day on innovation, outside of what I’m already doing, where I’m looking for anything else that is lateral to my business, anything that can provide means of an income or ways to leverage my company and what I’m already doing.”

Contrary to the beliefs of many, he warns that most of a creative business owner’s time will be spent doing things other than writing. “You, as a businessperson and a writer, have the responsibility of writing and running a business.” But when you’re able to do both, Viergutz says, “It’s kind of a superpower.”

Key 2: Self-Care

Self-care is a crucial part of an authorpreneur’s daily schedule—and that goes beyond under-the-desk walking pads or pedals. When you own your schedule, Viergutz says, you get to prioritize what’s important to you. For him, “taking care of myself physically, from sleep to spending time with my family,” allows him to feel driven and focused in his business.

When Krout noticed his health declining, he began implementing changes in his own work routine, starting with the boundaries around his work schedule. Those boundaries were essential to improving his daily schedule—and his health. “Anyone running a business knows how easy it is to work every spare moment they have,” Krout says. “Time management is not only about making sure you are working when you should but also making sure that you are resting and recovering properly.” 

Black mirrored their views, saying that along with knowing yourself in business and writing, it’s important to know and understand yourself in terms of your health and stages of life as well, as they can impact all forms of your energy.

“Anyone running a business knows how easy it is to work every spare moment they have. Time management is not only about making sure you are working when you should but also making sure that you are resting and recovering properly.”
—Dakota Krout

“You can’t always run at a thousand miles per hour in your writing and business,” she says. Over time, with age, or during certain seasons of life, you may slow down. “It’s genuinely important to go to the gym or to go for walks every day,” Black says. “We have to look after our physical selves.” 

Key 3: Systems and SOPs

When the CEO of your creative business is also the primary author and in charge of project creation, working with staff who can handle their responsibilities with as little assistance as possible allows you more time and freedom to focus on writing your next book. In businesses that have scaled, systems and standard operating procedures (SOPs) make that possible. 

SOPs are a set of documentation that detail when, where, why, and how work is done. These SOPs provide guidance to ensure that work is completed the same way every time. It also helps organizations to see where improvements can be made—even if that organization is a business of one. 

“One of the things I would die without are quite good systems and infrastructure now,” Black says. SOPs allow her business to run smoothly even while she’s focused on drafting or editing. Her operations manager set up her company’s systems, and Monday.com, a work management platform, has been instrumental in Black’s business operations.

“We have about fifty or sixty SOPs,” she says. “We also have our project management system. Everybody, except warehouse staff, has their own board where we can assign work to them. We also have databases containing all our information, data, contacts, social media, printer quotes, dozens and dozens of spreadsheets, stock management, and more.” She even keeps boards on Monday for her personal life. The tool makes it easier for her to batch work and efficiently manage her energy.

Black says that SOPs are essential for authors who are scaling their businesses. “They sound so boring, but honestly, Katie Cross did a session on SOPs at Author Nation, and it rocked my world.” She adds that for authors looking to scale, it’s crucial they have and use SOPs when hiring people, implement a project management tool like Monday.com, and centralize their company documents.

Viergutz echoes the need for SOPs. “Nothing in my company moves without being on paper first.” For his business, systems and SOPs are essential to assessing whether something is working, passing down knowledge when someone leaves the company, and understanding when certain tasks are taking more time to complete or having a significant impact on the company.

“Anything worth doing in your company is not only worth writing down but also worth sharing with others in your company,” Viergutz says. “My people share my vision because it’s written down everywhere—it’s all over my SOPs.”

Krout also relies heavily on systems and SOPs. For Krout’s company and his authors, any time they do something more than once, they make an SOP. “Almost nothing is truly ad hoc,” he explains. “If they’re doing something once, there’s a very strong possibility that they’re going to do it more than once.” 

Krout also leans on his staff to contribute to creating and maintaining SOPs. Once they turn it into something that is repeatable and managed, then they can optimize it. “If you find a better way, or if things change, go through and make it better. Once you find a way to make it better, write it down.” This process can make things slower to build, he acknowledges, but it also ensures they’ll benefit the company in the long run.

Not only does Krout have hundreds of SOPs across his business, both for authors and for the rest of the business’s staff, but he has also created a system to streamline communications within his business. Not every person can speak to or work directly with the CEO because then the CEO wouldn’t be able to focus on their strategic and visionary work. Over time, Krout implemented a system reminiscent of the military, complete with a chain of command and first-line leaders that allows everyone to be taken care of without him having to do it personally. “Requirements, delegation, and scaling all tie together to create a functioning ecosystem and community to enable long-term success,” Krout explains.

“Anything worth doing in your company is not only worth writing down but also worth sharing with others in your company.”
—David Viergutz

Unlock Structure

When looked at from a bird’s-eye view, it’s easy to see that even among successful authors running large businesses, there is no single daily schedule that allows authors to achieve some mythical level of work-life balance. Instead, a combination of time management and prioritization, self-care as a foundation, and systems and SOPs keep their businesses running and growing while enabling them to keep writing.

Whether an author is a morning bird or a night owl doesn’t matter, and neither does adherence to a daily writing schedule. What matters most, according to these authors, is an author’s ability to build structures that empower them to care for themselves, their families, and their businesses, which in turn allows them to earn a good living from their writing.

A day in the life of each of these authors reveals that your schedule can be more flexible than you might think, as long as you have those essential pillars in place to provide you with a long-lasting structure for your writing business.