Boring Business Stuff
Most people who read this site want to make some money from writing. Maybe they like the idea of building niche websites or becoming an author. It’s a pretty good idea; the ability to make money from writing has never been more valuable, with the internet, e-readers and print-on-demand technology both springing out of nowhere to give us writers chances that didn’t really exist until five years ago.
But writing as a career isn’t just about sitting and typing. Well, it can be, but it shouldn’t be. This article is a memo to myself and all the other writers who tend to forget about all the other stuff they need to do in order to write professionally for the long term.
In essence, this is an article about boring business stuff. Think of it like the article Non-Writing Skills You Need, but as a laundry list of boring business stuff you need to think about.
(Also, bear in mind you’ll have a natural inclination to do this later. Don’t put any of these things off, because it gets harder the longer you let it go on.)
Pricing
As writer’s, we’re in the business of selling words. Now we can justify it to ourselves as being creatives or helping people or being artists or whatever, but the fact is our words are products and services.
You need to have at least some idea of what you should be charging for a product or service. Remember, you’ll want to set professional rates if you want to be a professional. This is a place where independent authors really let themselves down: The price of a paperback book is £8.99 in a store, and probably £5.99 from Amazon and other outlets who get a discount: Why are you selling your self-published book for £4 paperback and your Kindle book for £0.99?
You look unprofessional, and you’re shutting yourself out of a lot of places because if you don’t make much of a profit, neither will resellers.
The same is true of services you might offer. If some companies in your area charge $1000 for a sales letter and you’re willing to do it for $150, then you’re massively undercutting your competition; and probably making companies that usually pay $1000 happily think you’re a con artist.
Pricing is important for psychological reasons. If you ever think you’re just throwing a number out there, you need to do more research.
Accounting (and taxes)
Confession time: I hate keeping accounts. It’s boring, tedious and every time the tax return deadline rolls around, I’m scrambling to find out what my allowable expenses are and collect all my receipts and whatnot.
Don’t be like me.
Accounting is a pain in the arse, but you should do it. Schedule a time every week where you collect up your receipts for both ins and outs, and then put the figures in a spreadsheet. Like cleaning your house, if you do it regularly it’s not a problem. Besides, the data is useful.
Publishing, Planning and Strategy
This article has come about because I’m going to finish writing a new book in the next couple of days. I wanted to release it on May 1st, but that’s probably not going to happen. The reason it’s not going to happen is that I’m looking to get a paperback proof before I send it out. I don’t think by the time I’ve formatted the manuscript and done all the other stuff that I’m going to have time to send off for the proof and get it back.
This could all have been avoided if I’d set myself a better time schedule and worked out everything in advance. The annoying thing is that I’ve thought and written about this sort of thing before. Now I can write to a deadline (there’s no way the book won’t be finished within the next couple of days) but I haven’t included all the other stuff into deadlines yet.
Research
Most of my ideas come from randomly browsing the internet, buying products I want to use myself and through freelance writing which causes my brain to click and think, “Hey, I wonder if anyone is doing that?”
This isn’t really something you want to be relying on either. I’m toying with the idea of spending one day a week specifically on research for new projects. It’s boring business stuff, but I figure if you want to grow a publishing company out of your writing business, you’ll need to be a bit more systematic about approaching research. An added benefit of this is that if you’re an evil genius in the making, you could probably farm out the research portion after working out how to do it in a way which an outsourced worker would be able to mimic.
Admin, Customer Service And General “Stuff”
Writing is only half the job. Some days, it’s not even half the job. If you’re pitching to clients regularly, doing research and other administrative tasks, these can eat up your time. I recommend trying to automate as much as you can of it by using template documents and just editing them. I’ve written loads of times about this in various forms; here’s one example of using templates for new books and site projects.
Final Thoughts
This list article has been a bit of a jumble of thoughts, but it’s a list of things I’ve realised I’m doing wrong. Hopefully that’ll mean it’s a little helpful. Obviously, the real help will be when I solve the issues I’ve talked about above and write articles about how I solved the issues. I will get to solving those things; first though, I’ve got a book to finish.