How to Set Up and Run An Heroic Writing Business
How to Set Up and Run An Heroic Writing Business
Join the Legion of Successful Author-Heroes
Most people consider themselves a hero(ine) in one way or another, even if they won’t admit it publicly.
The trick to this is that we really are our own hero. Because most of us think our lives run according to the Heroes Journey.
Anyone can improve their own hero status from a tragic hero to a triumphant one. The trick is to recognize the steps and actions you should be taking and doing.
Most people, myself included, don’t earn all the income they could because they lack a simple plan for their writing business.
And so, to make heroes out of all of you, this Great Fiction Writing Challenge now has one of these at the outset.
No, the challenge hasn’t begun in earnest yet. The official launch is in January, which gives me time to settle some construction dust.
One of these projects that has to be built is a daily and weekly schedule anyone can keep to build their Writers Business.
The trick is to recognize the non-fiction plot at work. What are the goals, the MacGuffin? What are the obstacles? What villain will raise their hand against you?
Like any good fiction, life is mostly considered by people as following the Heroes Journey. This is why they love good fiction and movies. Because, in general terms, it says things are going to turn out all right. Even our tragic hero(ine)s can find true love, make sense out things, and resolve their catastrophic lives into minor problems.
Life is non-fiction. But life has plots, like fiction does. Fiction just helps us make sense out of our too-real lives.
For writers, their failure to earn real income is due to not approaching life by determining its plot.
For instance, an old survey reported that 84% of all people never set a goal for themselves.
This is then a core problem. Every hero has something to do, some day to win, some romantic interest to save. But to deny the journey by not accepting the challenge just means you keep getting nagged about it forever by your muse.
The first action is to decide on and set a goal for yourself.
Following from that, you need to set metrics. What you measure, you can improve.
Now, if we keep examining our tragic writer-heroes against the successful writer-heroes, we find some more fascinating facts.
Most authors don’t make a living from their writing if they sell on Amazon. (About 4 out of 10,000 do, per Author Earnings May 2016 report.)
What are they doing? Well, they write and publish one book.
Successful writers publish dozens.
Tragic author-heroes promote their one books to their only network, which is composed of friends and family. So they sell about 200–250 copies.
Successful writers work to expand their audience by having mailing lists and also appear on podcasts and other media shows. This gets them in front of other’s audiences and get them to join theirs. Successful writers also do giveaways on Goodreads and Library Thing, and put sample chapters or whole books up on Wattpad. Many also make their first book in the series perma-free on Amazon. All so they can build their audience and network.
Tragic author-heroes write when they feel inspired.
Successful writers write every day, regardless. They set quotas for their word count and they achieve them. No excuses.
Tragic author-heroes keep their day job and retire to live on a too-small pension or government payments which require them to not work in order to keep them. They stick themselves to a fixed income.
Successful writers build a business part-time out of their writing and expand this to pay all their bills. They aren’t required to retire, because they love what they are doing and make tons more from their writing than any retirement sum could ever pay them.
Tragic author-heroes give up after their one book and consider themselves happy to have published at all.
Successful writers realize that the joy they got from writing can be duplicated over and over. They can create any amount of joy in their lives by simply continuing on with what produced that joy — sitting butt in chair and writing, then publishing what they wrote.
In the above, y0u see the basic plan of how to do things and win your own challenge. All of the above have been common knowledge in every survey done of writers for nearly the past decade. The vast majority of authors live the plot of the tragic hero.
The small minority of author-heroes are so successful that they have problems re-investing all the excess income they earn. But those successful author-heroes realize the same thing that the tragic writer-heroes do — that writing is a joy, every book gives you satisfaction from publishing, and you can repeat that joy and satisfaction over and over, indefinitely.
Rudiments of an Author-Hero’s Writing Business Plan
1. Set yourself up with a space where you can write every single day. Set a writing goal to meet, just above what you feel is comfortable. Set up a chart or a spreadsheet to track this. Enter the data on this daily.
2. Set some time daily to read. Devour books. This is where you get your inspiration from. Tab out the good ones so you can come back to them. Keep a notebook to hand for any inspired ideas you can use. (While you can also get good inspiration from movies and TV shows, books help you train your subconscious how to put sentences together, dialogue, pacing, etc.)
3. The rest of your life needs to be lived between those two bookends. Daily habits are a) Writing, b) Reading.
4. You also set up a feed reader to bring you articles about your craft that you can read when you are able to.
5. Part of that live you live has to be your business proper. It mostly consists of promotion. Promotion is simply appearing in front of other people’s audiences and getting them to join yours.
a) Get an email service (MailChimp is popular and free.) This is so you can get your readers over to your list and stay in touch with them.
b) Subscribe to HARO and RadioGuestList.com so you can contribute to people who need your help with content you can provide. Get interviews. Set up download pages for those interviews you get, so their audience can enjoy your material.
6. Don’t buy into advice that writing is hard. It does take time. But actually there are only a few points you need to know:
a) Write as best you can, outline anyway you want.
b) Get it edited by other’s eyes. ProWritingAid.com is a simple and inexpensive line-editor substitute.
c) Read your text aloud and record it. Edit your audio and post it as a podcast on Archive.org.
d) Post your story on Blogger (or some other inexpensive blog-host) so your audience can read your latest stuff. Embed your audio there.
e) When you’re ready to publish, put a buy-link at the top and bottom of those posts. (Like books2read.com, so they can buy them where they like to.)
f) And post your audio to Findaway.com to get your audiobook is up there, as well. (Use Direct2Digital.com for this.)
7. Meanwhile, keep writing daily, reading daily, and running your business daily.
Author-Heroes Success Tips
A. Writing Lots of books. Lots. This can’t be emphasized enough. If you are unsure of your quality, then use a pen-name. Pen-names allow you to move in and out of genres to try them out. Once you have a successful pen-name, then “co-author” with another pen-name when you move into a different genre. Fans of one pen-name can then start following your other pen-name and that series of books.
B. Work to get ahead of Amazon and other outlets by publishing your scenes or episodes as short-reads, along with the collections. In this way, your readers can keep up with your weekly series while the longer novel is being compiled. And yes, when you edit that scene, you can upload an improved version of your ebook. Direct2Digital above does good work for ebook conversions, or you can use Calibre on your own. Lulu does great paperbacks that get you into Ingram’s distribution.
C. The only real social media you need to utilize are LibraryThing, Wattpad, and Goodreads. The caveat is: Set. Time. Limits. Don’t waste time, invest it. These three sites are where the uber-readers get their fix. Those uber-readers are the ones you want on your mailing list and buying your books.
D. Mail your list weekly with a summary of what you’ve published that week. Build an Advance Reader Committee out of these, where you can send them pre-release copies (PDF’s) and they can give you feedback if they want.
E. All this means: 1) Write daily. 2) Read daily. 3) Publish often as you can. 4) Publish everywhere, in all formats.
F. Save time with aggregators. For original work, use Direct2Digital, PublishDrive, Lulu (paperback and hardbacks), Findaway (audiobooks), and direct to KDP/Amazon. Streetlib is another for ebooks.
G. Follow Jack Canfield’s advice and do three promotional actions daily.
Be Heroic Today!
This gives you the basic writing business plan. Get all these in at first.
Later you can experiment with Facebook ads and so on. But only when you have something to advertise. Preferably lots of somethings to advertise.
Concentrate on getting your reading/writing/publishing/promoting habits in first.
Your audience will love you when you keep their reading habits satisfied.
Luck to us all.
Originally published at Living Sensical.