Say that you’re a realtor. You keep separate spreadsheets for travel expenses, marketing expenses, houses sold, current listings, current and previous clients, commissions paid, and the like. Every year, you spend dozens of hours cobbling together these documents to satisfy your accountant.

What are the odds that you stick the landing?

The correct answer is not high. Even if you do magically thread the needle, you’ve doubtless wasted oodles of time resolving errors, tracking down receipts, removing duplicate entries, and the like. I’ll also bet that you paid your accountant more than you should have.

One would hope that realtors would use a system to make their lives less chaotic. Ideally, a few irritated clients or colleagues would provide the requisite motivation to get their houses in order (pun intended).

Parallels

Think of writing a book the same way. Consider just a few critical artifacts:

• Project plan.
• Table of contents.
• Research sources.
• Book blurbs.
• Drafts of chapters and manuscripts.
• Figures.
• Galleys.
• ePub files.
• Book covers.
• List of team members.

I could go on, but you get my drift. You can maintain separate folders or spreadsheets to track each of them. In fact, most authors and even publishers do. Each, though, is acting like our disorganized realtor. Horror stories aren’t uncommon.

Come on

Are these minor inconveniences? Hardly. Consider these questions:

• What if your editor is working on the previous version of the chapter?
• What if you forgot to cite a number of key sources?
• Did you forget to complete several essential marketing tasks?
• Did you miss the boat on getting book endorsements? Did a rock star’s effusive praise for your book miss the cut because the message was stuck in your inbox?
• A team member leaves and critical documents are lost for good. “Great, I get to do rework,” said no author ever.

What Authors Can Learn From Accountants and Payroll Managers

What You Need to Know

Using multiple systems multiples your odds of confusing yourself and others.

Fly by the seat of your pants if you like, but you could use a single system that stitches everything together and minimizes confusion for everyone involved on the project. Sure, occasional problems will still occur. All else being equal, though, you’ll see fewer of them.

Whether you use RacketHub or not, think holistically. I can think of few examples in which relying upon more or duplicate documents decreases complexity. Writing a book is not one of them.