I have
this weird relationship with my writing. It's one of the reasons I disdain MFA
programs—they are full of people who believe they are artists.[1] I am
not an artist, and that statement is not true. Writing is an art form, and I
have to own that, but I also want to sell my art so I can eat and pay bills,
and that makes my writing a business. The question becomes, how one balances
those two very disparate pursuits: one of art and one of business. I will be
the first to tell you that I am not very good at the latter.
Years
back, I attempted opening a pizza shop. The restaurant never opened,[2] but
I did come out of the experience with a very thorough business plan. I had pepperoni
priced out to the ounce, and I knew who my competition was. I knew what the
restaurant's mission was, and yeah the restaurant did have a mission. The last
few days I've been thinking about the pizza shop—not about what went wrong, but
about what went right. I had, for example, catering contracts in place before I
was even anywhere near opening—before I even had the pizza oven. And speaking
of the pizza oven, I managed to get a local company to move a PS360 Middleby
Marshall conveyor belt oven weighing over a thousand pounds with a 90-inch
width through a 32-inch wide door for free. And oh, yeah. I didn't have to pay
rent on the restaurant until six months after opening. I knew how many
deliveries Domino's down the street made a night because I sat in my car across
the street and counted how many times their delivery drivers left.
There
was a lot of success hidden away in the failure.
Now,
here I am today with two novels sitting on Amazon that in the three years the
books have been for sale, I have to account for their effort several very nice
reviews and a twenty-five dollar royalty check. I have a web page that I pay
twenty dollars per year on, and I have maintained that web page for three
years. I have made negative thirty-five dollars. By all accounts, this is a
much worse business venture than the pizza shop. But, you know: my writing is
an art and if you write a good book people on their own will find that good
book and that's all you have to do.
Because
it's writing, and because I've been told by so many people that writing is just
a hobby and you can't count on income from writing because it's art and no one
can make money at art, and I have even heard myself utter these words to myself….
because it's writing, I don't take what I do seriously enough for my writing to
make money. This attitude must change. I have to look at that 32-inch door and
stand beside my 90-inch oven and say, "This is not a problem."
What
was successful about my pizza shop was the business plan. What isn't successful
about my writing business is I have no plan.
I need to do some back-tracking. That doesn't mean removing my novels
from Amazon, but that does mean putting together an author business plan, and
following the plan. Business plans are normally a private ordeal—something very
few people see: the CEO, the banker, your landlord. One of the things I believe
though, being an author means giving. Over the next several weeks, I'll draft
my author business plan together. I'm going to share the plan and its writing
process right here on this blog.
My
pizza shop plan had seven chapters: the executive summary, the business
description, market strategies, competitive analysis, design and development
plan, the operations and management plan, and financial factors. Those seven chapters
are pretty typical in a business plan. I'm not sure at this point whether I
need all of those chapters or if I need different chapters or exactly what I'm
getting myself into. I've done some initial research and have discovered that
business plans for authors are not unheard of. The following are links I've so
far found useful:
- Writers in the Storm: Writing an Author Business Plan
- Molly Greene: Business Plan Basics
- Fiction University: Creating An Author Business Plan
- Career Plan for Fiction Writers
- Author E.M.S.: Why Go Indie?
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What
I'm going to do next over the next few days is to study the above links a bit
more in depth. I am not going to comment on them outright. I'll leave it for
you to decide whether they were useful articles or not. My next post will be on
vision casting, and we'll see where that takes us.
[1]I say this with
jealousy. I chose to do a MA. My wife was recently accepted to the University
of New Hampshire's MFA program. I spent a semester in the Iowa Writer's
Workshop as an undergraduate. I have dreams of applying to the low residency
program at Fairleigh Dickinson University after I attain a PhD.
[2]Let's just say
I didn't do my due diligence. The landlord went through a bankruptcy and the
repossessing bank decided I was one of the landlord's assets. It was a painful
moment.
