Treating your authoring like a business means creating a home office just for authoring, said Robert Christopherson, author of the best-selling U.S. and Canadian geography textbook, Geosystems.

“Prepare your home office and writing studio as if it were a formal business,” he said.

Christopherson had a cabinet maker build a full desk, elevated bookcases, and lateral filing cabinets for storing his preparation files, into his home office. The desk takes up three walls, and in the corner — so no space is lost — there’s a 36-inch lazy susan for storing supplies. The bookcases are elevated to allow room for a 14-foot long cork board for tagging items on. “Around the computer, the cabinet maker built a large theater-organ like console so that the computer screen is surrounded by a workspace where things can be posted and set,” he said. “I work on big broadsheets a lot of