Every Word You Write Is An Asset

Your Publishing Estate: Every Word Is An Asset

There are two ways to approach writing as a money making machine.

Firstly, you can think in terms of a job: You get paid per hour of your time, and the writing you do has to pay immediately for your time so that you can afford your groceries.

Secondly, you can write as a form of investment. This is something I’m going to harp on about at length over the fiction writing articles and articles about publishing. It’s important.

Every Book Is An Asset

Every book that you release is an asset. Every pamphlet is an asset. Every sales letter is an asset.

As a writer, it’s easy to get caught up in the idea of your writing as a job, because you’ll have to earn the money as you need it. Otherwise you go hungry.

I wrote in my review for Bob Bly’s book How To Write Simple Information For Fun And Profit that when I read that book, I realised that I needed to be thinking of each piece of work as an asset which I sell the rights to.

Not many jobs afford you the rights to your work for the future.

Sitting on my computer right now are millions of words (no exaggeration) that I hold the rights to. I’ve made money before by selling those rights for a limited time to companies, so that’s great.

But those words aren’t currently earning any money or building any value. They’re an asset that I could be using in multiple ways.

If you’ve been writing for some time, then you’re in exactly the same boat.

How To Turn Every Word into An Asset

The first thing you need to do is take stock – like a warehouse would – of where you are. Things that I’m doing right now include:

• Start an excel file. Put all of your yet-to-be-completed books, articles and other things on it. Write how close to completion they are, and (if you’re really boring) how long it’ll take you to complete them.
• Start an excel file with a list of your complete works that you own the rights to, including the date you wrote it, the subject, the type of work it is, and all those other things you need to keep track of but don’t.

If you’re a new writer, start this as soon as possible. You won’t think it’s worth it when you’ve only written your first 500 words for a blogger on elance, but it is.

An example of this happened to me this week. At one point, I was writing for a computer games review site. The project has since closed, but on my hard drive I have about a hundred reviews for various computer games.

This week, a new client approached me to write about a computer game. I knew I’d written about this game before, but I’d written about it during a lazy period where I didn’t keep a record.

I spent over an hour trying to hunt this article down. No luck. I had to waste that hour and start from scratch anyway.

If I had have kept a simple note on where it was, then I could have had the new article written in fifteen minutes.

Another example: I have a number of short stories that’d be ideal for a Halloween repackaging. They are in various stages of completion (I have over a hundred short stories that are ‘a bit’ written. That’s ten books worth,) and with a few minutes of noting down the things I need to know, I can pick the ones which I can realistically get completed on time for Halloween.

(Of course, I’m writing this article in advance. By the time you read this, the stories will be out.)

Holidays are great times to repackage old content. You can only do that if you know what your catalogue is and where it is.

Catalogue your complete and incomplete work.

Step 2: Finish the work that’s incomplete.

This is pretty straightforward. None of us can make money from a story that’s ¾’s finished, nor can we put up a sales letter that doesn’t have a “buy now” section. You can put up a website with no content if you’re creating an authority site or a niche site, but you won’t get anywhere without content.

So finish your work.

Step 3: Your Own Swipe File

In marketing, there’s something called a “swipe file.”

A swipe file is a collection of adverts and sales letters which a copywriter browses through and analyses in order to absorb the magic sales power.

Your catalogue of writing work is your swipe file.

You’ve written about things before. You can write about things now.

Your back-catalogue of work is going to be the answer to most of your problems. I’ve written so many reviews by now, the structure of a review is burned into my brain.

If you write novels, the same is true. If you write sales letters, the same is true.

You don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time you start a new project.

Step 4: Plan the Potential Avenues For Sale

This article is about turning words into assets.

How are you going to turn your back catalogue into assets?

It depends.

Again, go back to the Bob Bly review I posted earlier.

There’s an image of the contents page there. There are many different avenues that you can make work for your writing.

What type of writing you have will change what you can do with it.

For instance, if you have a short story, here’s what you could do:

1. Create a cover for that story. Edit it, finish it, write a blurb for it.
2. Distribute that story on its own to Amazon, Kobo, Nook, iTunes, Google Play and wherever else.
3. (Most people would stop here.)
4. Cross-Reference Your Back Catalogue and think about how to incorporate it into at least one bundle/collection with other works, depending on theme, setting, characters, etc.
5. Get a freelancer to narrate it and turn it into an audio-book.
6. Upload the audio book.
7. (Do you really think we stop there?)
8. Take a particularly tense part of your story, and create a video trailer so that people can read along on YouTube. Use the same words and everything. Use the content as your marketing material.
9. For a limited time, use your one story as bait to get people on your mailing list.
10. See if you can network with other writers and create a multi-author bundle for visibility.
11. Get someone to turn your words into a new asset: a screenplay, a text-based computer game.

I’ll leave it there with the ideas, because I’m sure you get the gist of the list.

Step Five: Sell

Make your book available. Make it available everywhere, not just on Amazon.

Step Six: Manage It

Assets aren’t set and forget. A lot of your short stories and web pages can be, but you should maintain them.

If you bought a rental property, you’d expect to spend a certain amount on upkeep every year. If you bought stocks in a company, you wouldn’t just leave them sat somewhere forever.

You maintain the value of the asset.

A lot of writers think that they are going to release a book and that will be the job done. Forever.

Don’t leave your writing hanging like that. Every so often, go through the steps above for everything you write. There’ll be new ways to make that asset more valuable in the future. Just think, ten years ago e-books were nothing and Kindle didn’t exist.

There are still writers who have books that are out of print in an age where print-on-demand is cheap and easy.

Don’t be left behind. Does your book need an updated cover? Does your sales letter from 2007 make reference to some cultural dodo that nobody would understand today?

Fix those things, and your writing can be an evergreen asset.