A few years ago I realized that I wasn’t just a freelancer, I was actually running a small business. I started listening to podcasts and joined the What Works community, so I could learn from other business owners. There was a lot of chatter about SOPs, which are not, sadly, stale pieces of leftover garlic toast used to soak up the last bits of a delicious minestrone soup, but something called “standard operating procedures.”

The acronym makes it sound fancy, but a SOP is really just a checklist that captures the steps you take to do any kind of task in your business. They are especially helpful if you have employees, so you can easily hand off or assign tasks, but I’ve found that they are just as useful for tasks I do myself because they save time and ensure that I don’t miss important steps.

For example, I set up a Trello board for many of my clients. It’s not hard for me to remember to set up the board itself, since it’s an important component of our work together, but before I created a SOP for onboarding, I often forgot to set the board to ‘watch,’ which meant I would miss messages from clients unless they remembered to tag me. Once I added this as a separate step, I could stop trying to keep this detail in my head or repeatedly checking client boards to make sure I had done it.

SOPs really show their value for tasks that you don’t do frequently, like formatting and publishing your books. Your formatting SOP, for example, can list the steps you need to take, as well as store the information you’ll need to have at hand, like what typeface you used for the first book in the series or your newsletter signup link. Your publishing SOP might list steps for the various stores and remind you how to access buried features, like the menu for setting international prices. SOPs save you from googling something you looked up six months earlier and promptly forgot.

I also find that SOPs can be reassuring when you are tackling complex creative tasks. I have one for blog posts and newsletters, for example, and I like the way the checklist flattens out the steps and makes them all seem a little less challenging. Writing: it’s just a step, not a mystical act! ✅ Hitting publish: it’s just a step, not a test of my personal bravery! ✅ Neither of them have to be any scarier than finding an image or scheduling the post or writing the SEO headline.

A SOP for a novel would look a bit different for every writer but might be something like this:

1. Identify some threads that keep coming to the surface in your thoughts – a character, an event, a plot idea, a theme, or a problem.

2. Choose a thread that seems like it has some length and heft to it, enough to allow you to weave a novel from it.

3. Carve out some writing time at intervals regular enough that you don’t lose the thread of the story in between sessions.

4. Start to explore the thread and see where it takes you and what patterns emerge.

5. Step back and evaluate what you have so far. If the thread still seems like it has potential, spend some time thinking about what kind of garment you are going to weave. What shape will the plot take? What kind of character arcs do you want to show?

6. Start writing again, this time following your loose pattern as a guide.

7. Continue to fill your well with experiences, research, and inspiration, especially when the words slow down to a trickle.

8. Keep writing until you’ve come to the end of the story and completed the arcs you’ve planned for your characters.

9. Put the manuscript aside for a few weeks and don’t look at it.

10. Come back to the manuscript and see what you’ve got. Can you see the kinds of revisions you want to make? Do you need feedback from an editor, beta reader, or critique partner?

The best way to create a SOP is to document what you are doing as you go through all of the steps. Then keep them all in one place – in a Google folder or Trello list, for example – so you can access and tweak them easily. SOPs are also a great repository for information that will help you improve your process the next time you do a task. Maybe you read a blog post about a tool for researching keywords. You could go to your SOP and add that as a step so you make sure you remember it for your next book, even if you don’t have time to learn more about it right then.

Once you start creating SOPs, you’ll have a hard time stopping. As all true Virgos know, there are few things more satisfying than checking items off a to-do list ✅ ✅ ✅.

Check out our Resources page for more in-depth articles on writing, revising, polishing, and publishing your novel. Sign up for our weekly newsletter for fresh content!