Why this exists

I spent a year getting my first novel ready to publish, and I built myself a robust Excel document to do it. Then, two months before I was ready to publish, I uploaded my manuscript to Amazon and IngramSpark so I could order proof copies, and instead I accidentally published the book. It turns out you cannot change a publication date once you've set it.

This was not the first thing I got wrong, but it was the most expensive. Almost everything in a book launch takes longer to arrange than anyone tells you, and I kept finding out at the point where it was too late to do anything about it.

What is in it

204 tasks across 14 phases, starting 52 weeks before your launch date.

You set one date and the plan builds itself. Every task is anchored to your launch date. If you move the date, then the whole plan moves with it.

It knows what you're actually doing. Turn formats and channels on and off in the Setup tab, and the tasks that do not apply to you will gray out and drop off your totals. Nothing is deleted. So if you change your mind in March, it all comes back.

It tracks what you thought it would cost and what it actually cost. There is also a break-even figure that tells you how many copies it takes to pay the whole thing back.

It is honest about lead times. Editors, cover designers, illustrators, and narrators book months ahead. The workbook tells you to ask about their availability first and to pick your launch date last, which is the opposite of what I did.

It marks the things you cannot undo. Including a section called Publish is not Order Proof, which exists because of the mistake I described above and which will take you two minutes to read.

It explains itself. A glossary, because there is no reason a first-time author would know what an LCCN is. A resources tab with the official filings, the places to check a service before you pay for it, and where you can actually find editors and designers.

It keeps going after launch day. I also added a tab to track your sales for the first year. What sold, what you were paid, and whether the launch made its money back.

Who IS this for and who IT IS not for

It is designed for the first-time author, fiction or nonfiction, publishing in the United States. It assumes you have never done any of this and do not yet know what the questions are. The filings in it are U.S.-specific. If you're publishing somewhere else, the sequence and the lead times will still work for you, but the paperwork will not.

This tool will not teach you how to write a book. This one starts where the book already exists and has to become a published thing.

It is a spreadsheet. If spreadsheets make you tired, this is not going to be the tool that changes your mind about them.

The download

It is free. I published my own book to see if I could do it, and I knew going in that I would lose money. If you are working on the same kind of budget, this is yours. It comes with my monthly newsletter, which is where I write about how the rest of this is going.

I built the first version of this myself while publishing my own book and then used Claude to help me rebuild it and expand it into what you are downloading. Nobody on the resources tab, paid to be listed, and there are no affiliate links anywhere in the file. Check every fee and lead time yourself because they will change.