Week 25 - Author Business Coaching Challenge - Priorities and Nested Priorities
How we rank, nest, and layer what matters matters
Welcome to Week 25 of our ongoing Author Business Challenge — Join us at any time.
This is week 25 of the 29-week author business coaching challenge taking place on The Profitable Author / An Author Business You Love every Monday. (All prior challenge weeks are indexed here.)
It’s free and open to all authors—established or aspiring; fiction or non-fiction; self-, hybrid-, or traditionally published. Fluffy or scholarly. Cookbooks or children’s books. All authors. Even you. Especially you.
Just set your goals for the months ahead and do the work on your own behalf.
Participate and support other authors as you can. We’ll be learning, absorbing, and applying 28 big ideas from the world of coaching to these goals.
You can, of course, modify your goals as you go. The ultimate idea here is to find yourself with a toolbox of coaching concepts that you can draw upon as needed going forward.
First, let’s review
Here was Week 24’s challenge article:
Reviewing last week’s big idea—Gratitude: What are you currently most grateful for in your author business? When you really let those thoughts of appreciation sink it, what shifts for you? What kind of momentum is building—or can you build—around these centers of gratitude?
Use the comments section in these coaching articles or anywhere on this Substack to ask a question, ask for help, test out an idea, share what works for you, propose a collaboration.
This week’s big idea: Priorities and Nested Priorities
Before reading on, learn more about the concept of Priorities and Nested Priorities for coaching yourself:
This week’s challenge
⎕ Spend some time in your journal writing lists of your priorities — what matters most in your author life, both overall and for the most important areas and roles. Play around with re-ranking those lists (diagrams and pictures may help) and seeing how they fit together. How do your priorities overlap? Where do they not mesh? What changes when the order changes?
⎕ After a walk or meditation session in which you reflect on your priorities as a whole and those specific to particular areas of your author business, return to your journal and consider if you’d like to change the order of any of them. Are there priorities to add or subtract from any of the lists?
⎕ Today as you go about your life and daily activities, note where your priorities come into play in your habits and in the decisions you face. Consciously refer to a mental list of priorities to help with your choices. Experience the ease, comfort, and confidence of knowing what your priorities are in a given situation. How does it feel to act in accordance with them?
This big idea in action
I see it in my clients all the time: When authors gain clarity about their priorities—what matters most AND how those priorities rank—decision-making becomes simpler and second-guessing goes way down. They breathe easier, worry less, focus more, get more and more important things done in less time.
Let’s look at some examples, amalgams of those I’ve worked with:
Clear that your quality of writing ranks above publishing frequency? Authors who know this finally give themselves permission to spend an extra six months refining their manuscript instead of rushing to meet an arbitrary deadline. They stop feeling angsty about their slower pace and start making strategic decisions about beta readers, developmental editing, and their brand positioning as someone who delivers excellence.
Nested priorities where family first, then sustainable income, then creative experimentation is the hierarchy? An author with this ranking structure plans their business completely differently than someone with the same three priorities in reverse order. They might focus on steady backlist income from an established series rather than risky, nichi-fic. They schedule writing time during school hours instead of late nights. They decline an exciting but time-intensive collaboration because it would disrupt the family rhythm they’ve worked hard to establish. Their business model reflects their priority structure—and they’re free from waffling and feeling guilty at every juncture because of it.
Know that financial stability currently outranks artistic risk-taking in your writing priorities, but community engagement tops them both? You might choose to write a commercially viable series in your established genre (financial stability) while building an engaged reader community through Substack or Patreon (top priority), reserving your pet literary experiments for later (ranked as such). Without this clear vision for yourself, you might have muddled along trying do all three at once, feeling frustrated that none were progressing well—or worse, prioritizing your experimental baby and then resenting, or pretending to be confused by, the fact that it wasn’t paying the bills.
Before you move on…
What’s one decision that would become easier if you had solid clarity about your author business priorities? In the comments, share your top 3 author business priorities in order. Just listing them publicly can create insights and accountability—and you might find solidarity with other authors navigating similar hierarchies or conflicts between their writing priorities and business priorities, their author lives and personal lives.
How you nest your priorities determines your income
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