Writing as a Business: Production, Distribution, and Marketing: Writing as a Business, #1

Introduction

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.

― Czeslaw Milosz

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything.… It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.

—Enid Bagnold

When I sit down with anyone who approaches me and says I want to write for a living I offer them exactly this advice: Do something else. Do something your family can get behind, like being a lawyer, leaving your profession as a chemistry teacher to cook meth and Break Bad, or even become a clown who only performs at kids’ birthday parties. You know, something respectable.

The reason is this writing thing is difficult. You have to treat your passion, something you enjoy, as a business, which means much of your time you will spend on other things besides writing. Because if you write a book, or want to write for magazines, or whatever writing career path you choose, you will spend only around half your time, maybe less, writing, and the rest on nurturing your career, or the business of writing.

That is because of one simple thing: when you publish anything and want to sell it, you have started a small business. You are an entrepreneur. This is the same whether you are published by a traditional publisher or self-published, or both. We will cover those things in detail later in this book, but for now it is enough to say if you don’t embrace the business side of writing, you probably won’t ever make enough money to break even, let alone be a success and write for a living.

There are those of you who will say you don’t care about making a living as a writer, and I will doubt your word right away if you are reading this book, but also I will ask you two more questions: Do you want other people to read your work? Why you are writing?

Most of us who write feel we have something vital to share with the world. Whether that is a story or stories, a message of hope or our own story of victory, the reason we take it from our minds and commit it to paper (pixels more often than not), is because we want others to read, understand, and apply that message. Most times with fiction, we may just want people to read and enjoy our stories.

Either way, the method people use to discover your stories is to purchase them or even download them for free if you really don’t care about making money. To do that, they must discover them. This means you must distribute and market them. This does not happen organically, because no writer anywhere knows enough people to sell enough of their books to be a bestseller or even close. They need other people to sell their books for them.

The problem with many writers of all types is they get stuck in the production phase of writing as a business. Often, they never even fully complete that process, let alone move on to distribution and marketing.

In this book we will focus on writing for authors, those who have created a book or books they want to sell. The same principles apply to companies who have eBooks they want to sell or get people to download. The same basic principles with some tweaks apply to those who write articles, poetry, short stories, and more. We will explore these in less detail, but in conjunction with the rest of our discussion.

The essential point of this work is to help you, a writer, whether you are an aspiring writer or a seasoned professional, understand writing is a business. There are three parts to that business, each with many facets. They are production, distribution, and marketing. They can be basically defined in this way.

Production: This is the process of taking your idea and formatting it into a marketable product whether that is a book, article, poem, or short story.

Distribution: This is the process of getting your product into the hands of readers.

Marketing: This process is how you let people know where you have distributed your work.

In the next several pages, we will talk about each of these aspects of the business of writing in detail. For your first reading, I’d suggest you read through the whole book, front to back. Then go back and skip around as you need to re-reading the parts that are most applicable to your situation and writing career.

As serious as I am when I tell new writers to do something else, what I really mean is writing as a business is hard. It takes work. If you can do something else, do it. You will save yourself hours of heartache and sorrow, because you are taking something you love, your passion, and making it into a job. This is challenging not only mentally, but physically and spiritually.

However, if you, like me, find you really aren’t that good at anything else, and you need to do this for a living, and find a way to make it work, read on. You will gain a satisfaction known only to a select few in the world, have hours of joy to offset the frustration, and those around you will find you a livable and tolerable person.

Ready? Want to follow the path of making a living as a writer and treating writing as the business it is? Then turn the page. We will start with the mostly fun part: production.

Part One

Production

Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.

—Larry L. King

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

—Tom Clancy

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.

—Lawrence Block

Like any other business, the business of writing has three parts: production, distribution, and marketing. The first one we will tackle is production. This portion is also broken into several parts.

Writing: To produce something, you will have to write some words. We’ll tackle that aspect of production first.

Rewriting or Revision: This is what you do to your writing when it is done but before you send it on to an editor.

Hiring an Editor: Nope, you can’t just edit your own stuff. You need to hire someone to do it for you unless you are being traditionally published. Even if you are pitching to agents and editors, you want to pitch your best work, so hiring an editor is just best-practice.

Sourcing a Book Cover: If you’re self-publishing, you must do this. Like editing, you probably cannot create your own covers and do it well. There are very few exceptions to this rule.

Formatting: This is the process of making the inside of the book easy to read with the right fonts on any device or in print form. You can learn to do this yourself for the various formats, or you can hire someone. We will look at the pros and cons of both.

Uploading your work: Uploading to various sites and arranging for Print on Demand (POD) or for large print runs.

As mentioned before, this is taking your idea and transforming it into a product you can sell. Over the next few chapters, we will engage each of these concepts individually.

Chapter One

Production Starts with Writing Some Words

A writer reports on the universe. When he presents his credentials, the gates of heaven and hell are equally opened to him. He can hear the devil’s defense and god’s accusations. The guards at the king’s heart let him in. The writer can be anything and anyone he wants. When he writes he is a god, he creates. 

― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls of Eternity

This is the stage at which you plagiarize the alphabet: you actively rearrange those 26 letters into some thoughts all your own. It does not matter at this point what kind of book you are writing. In order to proceed with any of the next steps, you need some words strung together in a manner your target audience can understand and will want to read.

How do you do this writing thing? Maybe at this stage, you just have a vague idea. Perhaps you have an outline or even an assignment. No matter what you are writing, there are some keys to finishing the story.

Write Quickly

Your first draft should be written quickly. The first draft of a novel length work should take you no more than six to nine months. Why that number?

Every writer writes from the heart, and over time your heart changes. So does the rest of you. Think about how much you have changed just over the last year. Now think about how much you have changed over the last five years. If you take three to five years to write a novel, you are a different person by the time you finish. Your voice has changed because your heart has changed. This means the editing process will be that much more difficult, unless you edit as you go - something you should not do - see the next point in this chapter.

The point you need to take away is you should complete any writing work as quickly as possible, while your mind is fresh in the subject and your thoughts are focused. The more times you go away from them then go back, the more likely it is your thoughts will become jumbled.

Do Not Edit as You Go

Yes, you can backspace, or quickly correct the spelling the squiggly red line shows you, but do not go back and rewrite until you have written the end. The temptation is real, and some will tell you editing as you go is perfectly okay, but as someone who has edited over 50 full-length manuscripts and several smaller ones over the last several years, I can tell you that I can tell when a writer went back and rewrote a section. How?

Because doing so interrupts your flow. When you start to write again after editing, your voice will change slightly. Usually, this causes you to make errors—small ones, but you take a few moments, or paragraphs, to get back into your story or thoughts. You will end up cutting some of these words later. It’s inevitable.

For example, if you wrote this:

Can we cut the chatter? I want to hear if something is coming, Jim said. Or if we need to go backwards really fast, he said to himself.

You bet. Last thing I want to be known as is a big blabbermouth. I could go on and on about mining. Talk for hours about what we do. If you think I’m running off at the mouth, you just tell me, and I’ll keep my talk to myself. I worked with a guy down here once who didn’t shut up for damn near the whole—

Dex?

Yeah?

Shut up, okay?

You might be tempted to go back and re-write part of the dialogue. But the way it came out of your head flowed well, and when you make everything grammatically correct and eliminate contractions, suddenly the dialogue doesn’t sound natural anymore. Don’t do it.

Editing as you go increases the length of the editing process, since your editor has to edit out poor transitions or unnatural dialogue, smooth them over, then attempt to recreate the flow that was already there before you paused your writing process to go back and make corrections. The more an editor has to work on your manuscript, the more they charge, if you are hiring a freelance editor before entering your path to publication.

Hemmingway said you should write drunk, edit sober. It takes time to go from one to the other. It has also been said you should write with the door closed, edit with the door open. Never edit with the door partway open. What are we doing, heating (or cooling) the whole world with our words? All joking aside, be either writing or editing, never both at the same time on the same project.

Fiction Outlining and Research

There is often a debate between outliners and pantsters, those who research and outline ahead of time versus those who write until the end with little or no outline and save the research and outlining for the rewrite.

For instance, you might want your murderer or even your protagonist to have a certain type of gun they carry. If you are an outliner, you probably have researched this ahead of time, and already know what you will use in your story. If you are a pantster, you might just write TYPE OF GUN HERE in all caps so you will see it when you do revisions and come back to add the more detailed description later.

Outliners: These writers have every twist and turn of the story planned out before they even begin to write, some of them down to the outline of chapters and scenes. However, most will tell you this outline, however detailed or loose, is done before they ever sit down to write. 

Once they start writing, they do not go back to re-outline or do more research. They simply write until the end and then go back and make corrections. Many outliners will even confess that things do not always turn out how they outlined them. Characters tend to have a mind of their own and take the story their own direction, especially in more character driven stories.

Pantsters: These writers sit down with an idea and a general direction, writing by the seat of their pants (thus the name pantsters). They start to write and follow the story and the characters wherever they go. With no outline in mind, they truly experience their book or story along with the characters.

This is also sometimes called discovery writing, because you discover the story as you go, like wandering through a strange house with a flashlight, but no real idea of where you are going.

Does this make a mess sometimes? Yes. If the writer gets distracted at some point, they can follow an aspect of the story that goes nowhere and have to backtrack and delete it later, in the editing process.

This type of writing can produce spectacular stories. Think of Lord of the Rings (outlined) vs. Christine by Stephen King (pantster). Each writer must gauge for themselves how much they can free-flow their plot, and how much structure they need to make their stories work.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses.

~ Stephen King

Either way, as a punster or as an outliner, it is vital that both types of writers write from beginning until the very end.

The Mixer: Some writers start as pantsters, but part way through the book, they outline the rest of the story to make sure they get where they are going.

This is perhaps the most common type of writer I have come across. They blend the two techniques of writing.

How long do they free-write before they outline? It varies. Some start with a loose outline and tighten the structure as they go. Others create the outline when they are done with the story during the re-writing process, to make sure they have included all the elements they need, and that the story follows a good structure.

No matter what your method, writers write from the beginning until the very end. The best first drafts are done quickly, and they are re-written then edited only after that initial draft is done.

It pays to remember at this point that all rough drafts are crap. You cannot look at your first draft and get discouraged. That is like looking at flour, eggs, oil, some cocoa, and milk on the kitchen counter, tasting some of each, then saying, Wow, my chocolate cake tastes horrible.

You wouldn’t taste a cake before it is done. So, likewise, don’t judge your writing during the drafting stages.

Non-fiction Outlining and Research

Non-fiction is an entirely different type of writing, and research and outlining are a must.

Generally, most non-fiction is linear in some way: usually time or the ordered steps in a process. Often if the order is not followed, the results are disastrous. Think of a recipe book or automotive repair manual: do the steps in the wrong order or add a flashback to what you should have done in step three when you are now on step six will not work.

Again, this depends on the writer and what you are writing about. Almost without exception though, you cannot be a pure pantster and write good non-fiction.

As an example, let’s talk about writing memoirs: If anyone tells you, they are writing their memoir and have no outline, it usually becomes something called creative nonfiction. You can almost guarantee there are errors in the story, and part of the story has been fictionalized at some point.

With few exceptions, memoir must be written with a linear structure of some sort. Yes, there can be flashbacks (only if they are done well), but there must be a structure to those too.

Now, you could start writing stories that will fit in your memoir without an outline, and you might even get things written, but your final book will take longer to assemble than if you would have started with a solid direction and goals in mind. It is the same with other topics. While you can write some things out of order, if you already know where they should be placed when they are complete, it will speed the assembly of your book and the final editing process.

For the most part, write your draft of nonfiction quickly for the same reason you write your fiction quickly. But there is more leeway with non-fiction. You might need to do extensive research as you go, of