Applying Business Principles & Practices to your Writing Life Series: Introduction

A bit of background: Together, my husband and I have over 30 years of experience in the business world. This includes working for small companies and very large companies, in positions ranging from entry level to Assistant Vice President. As many of you know, I have been working on learning the craft of fiction writing for nearly five years at some level or another, so this series is helping me, too. These posts are intended to share some of the ideas, principles and practices we learned in the business world (mostly my husband's part), and then show how we can take these concepts and apply them to our writing life (mostly my part), making our writing time more efficient, productive, and rewarding.

For this series, the business principles and practices posts will be divided into two sections:

Firstly: Strategic

The purpose of the strategic items is to outline the fundamentals of what the business needs to achieve. These are the overarching items that are set at the highest levels of the organization to help guide decision-making. For us writers, these high-level concepts will help us gain focus and direction in what we write and how we promote our writing, etc. The items we will cover in this part of the series are:

Vision Statement
Values
Brand
Mission Statement
Wrap-Up Strategic Post: Vision & Values in Action

Secondly, We'll take a look at some of the Tools required to make a business work.

After the strategic items have been set, we need to figure out how to move forward in line with these items. To do that, we'll covered the following in this section.

Goal Setting
Measuring your progress
Planning
Brainstorming
Presentation skills

In each post we'll explain the business concept, and then show how you might apply it to your writing life. Whether you dabble in writing, or look at it as your profession, I believe this series will help you define your focus, and increase your productivity.

If there is a particular business practice or principle that you have heard of and would like discussed, but is not outlined above, please let us know, and we’ll see what homework we can do to incorporate it into additional posts.

We're looking forward to sharing this series, and pray that you will gain much from it.

Blessings,

Phil and Eileen