🔪Ginsu Drop: Biz Diversification Audit Worksheet

Are your eggs in one basket or many? Let's find out.

Jul 22, 2026

Recently, my article, Castles in the Sand asked the uncomfortable question:

How much of your author business is built on tools and platforms you don’t actually control?

In the daily hustle and bustle of life, business, and getting things done, it’s not always something we think about, but it should be.

Always, always have an exit plan.

Don’t have one yet? Let’s find you one. Start with this worksheet. It’s your one-person publishing studio diversification diagnostic. Print it, fill it in, find out where you stand. Or, make your AI do it. That works too.

📋 Want the fillable version? Duplicate this Notion page to fill in digitally, or grab the PDF.

Note: I did a YouTube live on this here. The Automated Author segment around the 29-minute mark hit the line this whole worksheet is built around:

“The real key is flexibility. If we know our process, our prompts, Skills, and workflows can come with us wherever we go.”

Six months later, this worksheet is how you find out if that’s actually true for your own studio. Or if you’ve been building castles in the sand.

⚡ What Is Diversification, Really?

Before we audit, let’s define what we’re actually looking for. Diversification is anything that reduces:

Single-point-of-failure risk (one tool disappears, one platform bans you, one API sunsets, and your whole studio goes dark)
Proprietary lock-in (files you can only open in one program, workflows you can only run on one platform, audiences you can only reach through one company’s algorithm)
Provider dependency (one company’s terms of service, one company’s pricing whim, one company’s continued existence)

Diversification doesn’t mean using ten of everything. It means your process, your prompts, your Skills, your files, and your audience can come with you wherever you need to go. Portable formats. Exportable data. Skills as text files, not vendor-only scripts. Backups that aren’t hostages.

If Vellum shut down tomorrow, could you still ship a book next month? If Claude or Novel Crafter or ChatGPT disappeared, would your prompts survive? If Substack pivoted, would you still know how to reach your readers? That’s the audit.

Instructions

For each of the 9 Author Studio Stack categories below, answer the three audit questions honestly. “I have no exit plan” is a valid answer. This is an assessment, not a test.

Time needed: ~20 minutes (more if the honest answers make you flinch)

Grading scale:

🟢 Green: Portable, backed up, and you could switch providers in a weekend. You own your files, your process is documented, and no single vendor’s disappearance would stop you.
🟡 Yellow: Some risk. You could recover, but it would hurt — a week of rebuilding, re-exporting, or re-learning. You have partial backups or a second option you haven’t fully set up yet.
🔴 Red: Sole provider, proprietary lock-in, no exit plan. If this vendor disappeared tomorrow, you’d lose work, audience, or momentum you can’t get back with a weekend and a credit card.

Category 1: ✍️ Writing

(Be specific: “just Scrivener,” “Claude + custom Skill,” etc. For lock-in, think: proprietary file format? sole-provider API? subscription with no export? For exit plan: “none” / “rebuild in a weekend” / “would take a month” / “have exports/backups.”)