Publishing is all business. You have to deal with business plans or proposals, contracts, negotiations, promotion, platform, a publishing company—someone else’s or your own, marketability, taxes, and, of course, sales and royalties.
But it’s not all business.
Take, for instance, the act of writing, which is creative by nature. Writing involves ideation, character or content development, plot, structure, and imagination. It also requires problem solving abilities, which rely on creativity.
Publishing requires a unique blend of business and creativity.
Business Takeover
For many years, I’ve stressed the cold, hard business side of becoming an author. After all, tackling these tasks are necessary if you want to produce books that sell.
However, it’s easy to end up felling as if the business side of publishing has taken over your writing life. Believe me, I understand! You end up not writing. Instead, you spend your days on social networks, sending emails, fussing with your website, blogging, and finding ways to promote and build platform.
It’s frustrating, right?
As I wrote and spoke about the business side of a writer’s life, I never forgot the warm, soft (even fuzzy) side or becoming an author. After all, like you, that’s what I want to do—write. And the creative side drives the business side of publishing. Without book ideas and manuscripts, publishers—traditional or indie—have nothing to publish.
We writers are creatives, but sometimes we struggle to put words on paper. Or we just can’t come up with a new idea or the right idea. Can you relate?Continue reading
