Charlie Degennaro is an Australian founder who created AuthorHQ to help other authors manage the self-publishing process. Here she shares her tips for managing your writing and publishing process.
Writing a book is already a huge undertaking. Then, somewhere along the way, you discover that being a self-published author also means becoming a marketer, project manager, administrator, content creator, finance officer and approximately twelve other things you didn’t realise you were signing up for!
There are books to track, launch dates to remember, ARC readers to manage, social media posts to plan, expenses to record and a never-ending list of small tasks competing for your attention.
It can become overwhelming very quickly—especially when the information you need is scattered across notebooks, spreadsheets, emails and half-finished documents.
The good news is that you don’t need to become a productivity expert or build an enormously complicated system. A few simple changes can make the business side of self-publishing much easier to manage. You’ll thank me later!
1. Give every task a proper home
One of the biggest causes of overwhelm is trying to remember everything.
You might have a note on your phone reminding you to contact an editor, an email containing your cover deadline and a mental note to organise your ARC team next week. None of those systems are necessarily bad, but together they make it difficult to see the full picture.
Choose one main place to record your publishing tasks and deadlines. It could be a planner, a spreadsheet, a project-management tool or an author-specific system, like AuthorHQ.
The important thing is knowing that when something needs to be done, it goes there—not into the mental pile you’re already carrying around.
2. Break your book launch into smaller stages
“Launch the book” is not a task. It’s an entire project disguised as one intimidating line on your to-do list.
Instead, divide the launch into stages such as:
- Manuscript and editing
- Cover and formatting
- Pre-order preparation
- ARC distribution
- Marketing and content
- Release week
- Post-launch follow-up
From there, give each task its own deadline. “Send ARC copies on 4 October” is much easier to act on than “sort out the ARC team.”
Working backwards from your release date also helps you catch unrealistic timelines before they become late-night emergencies.
3. Stop rebuilding the same process for every book
Authors often repeat many of the same tasks for each release: booking editors, ordering covers, preparing metadata, recruiting ARC readers, scheduling newsletters and creating launch content.
If you’ve completed the process once, you shouldn’t have to rely on memory to recreate it next time.
Build a reusable checklist for your standard publishing process. It doesn’t have to be perfect or overly detailed. Start with the steps you already know, then update it whenever you notice something missing.
Over time, that checklist becomes your own publishing workflow—one that gets easier and more reliable with every book.
4. Keep your important information connected
It’s incredibly easy to lose track of which editor worked on which book, who has received an ARC, when a cover payment is due or where you saved the final blurb.
Try to keep related information together.
For example, each book could have one central record containing its publication date, ISBN, retailer links, collaborators, expenses, launch tasks and marketing information.
That way, when you need to check something six months later, you aren’t searching through old emails and mysteriously named files hoping to stumble across it.
5. Build a system that works on your worst week
It’s tempting to create an elaborate productivity system when you’re feeling organised and motivated. The problem is that your system also needs to work when you’re tired, busy, behind on content or questioning every decision you’ve ever made.
Keep it simple enough that you’ll actually use it.
You don’t need to track every possible piece of data just because you can. Focus on the information that helps you make decisions, meet deadlines and understand what is happening across your author business.
A good system should reduce your workload—not become another job you have to maintain.
You don’t need to do everything at once
Getting organised doesn’t mean spending an entire weekend transferring every scrap of information into a shiny new system.
Start with your current book or your next release. Add the deadlines you already know, create a basic task list and collect the information you use most often. You can build from there as your needs grow.
I created AuthorHQ because I could see how much authors were expected to manage alongside actually writing their books. It brings books, launches, ARC readers, content, tasks, finances and other parts of the author business into one place, without requiring authors to build the whole system themselves.
You can learn more or create a free account at https://authorhq.app.
However you choose to organise your publishing business, the goal is the same: spend less time searching for information and trying to remember what comes next—and more time working on the books that made you want to do this in the first place.
By Charlie Degennaro, Founder of AuthorHQ