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Happy New Year to all! And you know what that means: It’s a great occasion for every creative professional (that includes you!) to conduct an annual career audit. (Yay!)

I’m aware that may not sound like the most fun way to start your year—and I also know that for many creatives, thinking about the business side of our business may not come naturally or easily. But as regular readers know, I advocate taking regular stock of where you stand in your career and setting a clear, concrete course for moving forward.

If you hope to write professionally and create a career from your creative efforts—whether it serves as your sole income or not—then, like me, you are a freelance entrepreneur, and treating your work as a business is essential for building a successful freelance writing career.

By “career” I don’t mean whether you make a living from your work, or whether you are published—or “traditionally” published—or even whether you make any money from your writing at all. In my book The Intuitive Author I explain that I use the word according to the Webster’s definition: “a profession for which one trains and which is undertaken as a permanent calling… Pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement.”

That describes pretty much every writer I know: It’s the rare author who doesn’t train diligently and endlessly to master the myriad skills of our complex craft; most feel that this work is a lifelong passion and a calling; and no matter what level you are or want to work at, I see few authors indeed who don’t attain progressive achievements if they dedicate themselves to their craft and their career.

The bedrock of building a successful, satisfying writing career is taking it seriously: your writing, your career, and yourself. And creating a well-thought-out, concrete road map for your professional life is an excellent tool for doing that.

For me that boils down to three areas: a mission statement, goals and priorities, and a business plan.

Mission Statement

This what drives all my efforts, my core motivation for everything I do that guides all the choices, decisions, and plans I make for my business and creative career. I use it as a touchstone to make sure I’m staying true to my central drive in my work, but also to bolster me when my motivation is flagging or I feel as if I’ve lost sight of my North Star.

I strongly recommend not just considering and defining yours, but literally writing it down and keeping it in a file you regularly revisit. What propels you to sit down at your computer or notebook and put words on a blank page? Why do you work to hone your craft knowledge and skills, to develop and deepen and fine-tune your stories, to find a market or a way to reach readers with them?

At bottom, what gets your butt in the seat on the regular (and I do recommend some regular—but not necessarily daily—schedule if you want to build a productive career) to turn the people and worlds in your head into a compelling story on the page? Writing can be a challenging, demanding, often frustrating career path: Your mission statement should reflect your deepest core drive for wanting to pursue it—the fuel that keeps your fire lit.

Here’s the most current version of my own mission statement, which I share right in my bio: “To empower authors and editors to take ownership of their own careers by honing their knowledge, skills, and experience in the craft and business of writing.”

Editing—working with authors, reading and analyzing story—has been my core passion and my calling since I walked down to Midtown from my Upper East Side studio apartment to pick up my first freelance job one million years ago in the golden olden days of publishing. As I clutched the actual printed galleys to my chest on the way home, I prayed this would be the start of a viable career (who could have imagined…?).

And I’ve maintained that enthusiasm and love for what I do on the daily for more than thirty years. I still often marvel that I read books for a living! And joke that my worst day at work is still a pretty damn good day.

But I’m going to be transparent here: This past year I experienced several bouts of what I would classify as minor burnout—something unusual for me. More than once I actually considered whether I should contemplate a career change, a possibility that stalled out mainly because I don’t really have any other marketable skills…and because of this frank but accurate reality check with my husband:

• Me: Do you think I’m too old to go back to school to learn another career?
• Hubs: I don’t know. What career are you thinking of?
• Me: I think I might like to be a research psychologist.
• Hubs (after a tactful beat): Yes. You’re too old for that.

But when I reread this mission statement above, it still felt accurate to me—and it still felt important, even amid my moments of burnout. My mission statement refocused me on that core intention and drive.

That helped me realize that it isn’t my career or industry that I may need to rethink; I still love what I do. I just might need to reconsider how I want to do it going forward.

That brings me to the next step of an annual business audit:

Goals and Priorities

I started concretely prioritizing just a few years ago, at the excellent suggestion of a friend and fellow self-employed creative who, like me, often finds herself tightly booked and stretched thin.

I built my successful freelance career on being what I (half) jokingly call “the yes girl”: the one who always accepted the assignment; the one publishers, authors, and others could count on to step up, get the job done on time, and do solid work.

But that has often resulted in taking on so many commitments and packing my schedule so tightly that I feel I’m swimming as fast as I can to keep my head above water. Part of me thrives on that ambition and pressure and energy—but sometimes it feels like too much, swamping me under an endless tsunami of to-do items and crowding out other areas of my life.

My friend challenged me to write out all the various prongs of my business in order of importance to me, and to physically consult it every time I’m offered a career opportunity—and it’s been a game-changer.

My version is broken into several main categories:

• Editing
• Speaking/teaching
• Writing

Within each of these main categories are subcategories—for instance, as a result of doing this career inventory last year, “editing” divided into both actual hands-on developmental editing work, as well as direct in-person (via Zoom) consultations. “Speaking and teaching” include live online teaching, like with Jane Friedman or Writer’s Digest; my recorded self-directed Working Writer courses; and in-person events and conferences. “Writing” encompasses articles for writing outlets; my books; and my blog.

And within those categories may be further subcategories: with dev editing, for instance, there’s working directly with publishers; working with authors I’ve edited before; working with new clients, etc. My writing work is further divided by each outlet I contribute to.

I flow-charted those suckers out in order of where I most want to focus my time and efforts, and before I say yes to a single job I take a look at how booked my schedule is, and where in that written priority list the opportunity falls. When I’m less tightly booked, I accept work farther down the list; when my schedule is pretty packed, only the top couple of categories get a “yes.”

This technique has done wonders for my schedule, my psyche, and focusing my efforts where they matter most. For you as writers, perhaps your categories divide into writing your books; other writing work; marketing and publicity efforts; ongoing social media and other online presence; etc.

And see if those categories break down even further: For instance perhaps your writing breaks into various genres you write in; your paid writing work divides into various publications and outlets that buy your work; your social media divides into the specific platforms you use, etc.

Not only does prioritizing help you determine where to focus your efforts; it’s a concrete identification of what those specific efforts are, so that you can move to the action-plan part of creating a workable road map for your career:

Business Plan

None of this helps you move the ball down the field of your career unless you develop a specific, concrete, actionable plan for developing your creative business:

• First I look back at the year past: How many of my goals did I hit over the year? How successful were my efforts? How satisfying were they?
• Then I consider my situation now—has it changed since last year? And I consider whether my priorities and values have evolved as well. None of our lives remain in stasis—our circumstances; situation; outlook; emotional, mental, and physical health; and personal priorities can and do and should evolve. Otherwise we’re stagnating.
• Finally, I refer to the past year’s business plan and—taking into account my answers to the above questions—I determine where I want to put my efforts in the coming year and what I might want to change, if anything.

In 2025 I had a banner year—a career best, income-wise, as well as encompassing some pretty fantastic opportunities and experiences, like being asked to present several keynote speeches and traveling to my first international conference as a featured presenter, in Stockholm.

But I also stretched myself much thinner than I intended to.

Last year I had reworked my business plan a bit to encompass consultations; raised my private-client rates for the first time in several years; and renegotiated my publisher rates, which were woefully out of date and undervalued. My plan was that these measures would allow me to ease off on my usual pace a little—but in typical fashion I nonetheless packed my schedule pretty full. I suspect that contributed pretty heavily to my bouts of burnout.

This past year several areas of my life changed: The hubs retired; I committed to playing regular pickleball with friends; and we lost our elderly dog, Alex, which—heartbreaking as that was—gave us more freedom to travel.

Make a concrete, actionable plan for how you want to move forward in your career, so you have a clear road map to follow in pursuing your goal(s).

I also determined that I want to develop a hobby or two—I have none, having historically preferred to dedicate a lot of my “free time” efforts to various aspects of my career (idea development; course creation; research reading; exploring craft concepts; etc.).

All that means that for 2026, I feel more determined to keep parameters around my workload. That means considering what I most want to do with the time I will spend working at my career, guided by my priority list.

The key is to not just loosely or generally define your objectives, but to make a concrete, actionable plan for how you want to move forward in your career, so you have a clear road map to follow in pursuing your goal(s).

For instance, as a writer that might include:

• Finish a particular manuscript (including every step of editing and revision to a polished final draft)
• Get published (be specific about how, prioritize the order of your options, and write out the necessary steps you’ll need to take)
• Expand your social media presence (again, be specific about what exactly you mean by this and what it requires)
• Generate (more) income from your writing (write down the concrete steps you’ll take toward this goal)
• Etc.

Now refer to your goals, priorities, and values—for your life, not just your career—and consider what is required for you to attain satisfaction within them, realistically.

Unexpectedly, teaching and speaking live (both online and in person) have become among my favorite parts of my job, so committing to a robust schedule for that was an easy choice: I’m creating six brand-new courses for Jane Friedman this year (a healthy lift), a new editing master class, and have scheduled a half dozen additional online webinars with Writer’s Digest.

I also accepted invitations to some favorite conferences, including returning to the Stockholm Writer’s Festival in June and the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop in Dayton, OH. But I have turned down a few other opportunities, trying to leave myself some bandwidth and flexibility.

Read more: “The Great and Terrible Power of ‘No’ in Your Writing”

Editing authors’ manuscripts—besides being my main focus and source of income—is also the way I keep my skills sharp and my market knowledge current, come up with new ideas, and develop new techniques to help authors in their writing and revising work, so that stays high on the priority list. But given my desire to keep my schedule more manageable, I’ll be taking on fewer clients and full-edit jobs than usual.

I found—again, somewhat to my surprise—that I really enjoy the direct consultations with authors, so I’m leaving room in my schedule to allow me to accept more of these jobs. That also lets me maintain availability to work with authors I might otherwise not have the ability to book for full dev edits, considering my intention to pull back a bit in that area.

The main area where I decided to throttle back this coming year is in writing: I took a yearlong sabbatical from two of the main outlets I contribute to (Writer’s Digest and Writer Unboxed), and have decided to keep my WIP craft book on character development on the back burner for one more year. (I know I’ve been talking about that book for a couple of years now, and some of you have written to say you’re eager for it, which I’m gratified to hear. It’s coming, I promise! Just not next year.)

And I’m expanding one area: the self-directed online Working Writer courses. I’m updating some older courses and have already posted two new ones (“Secrets, Twists, and Reveals” and “Deep Third Deep Dive”), with numerous others recorded and awaiting editing. (I’m also lowering the price of the courses this year—for a few reasons, but mainly because I want to keep them easily affordable.)

When I consider all these areas together—my core drive; my current situation, values, and priorities; and my goals for moving forward—it yields a clear, actionable business plan that’s kept my career thriving and growing for decades.

So now it’s your turn, authors: I strongly encourage you to consider—in writing—these areas for your own career and keep them in a file among your other business documents (you do keep a dedicated separate folder for the business side of your business, yes?). And I’d love to hear what you’re thinking as you develop your own mission statement, goals and priorities, and concrete plans.

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