Treating your writing like a business

Today, 10 March 2020, I wasn’t supposed to be sitting here at my desk. I was supposed to be giving a talk at the London Book Fair Writers’ Summit but…. #coronavirus. So here’s the talk, because it seems a shame to waste it, and maybe it’s exactly what you need to hear right now.

If you’re writing a book, it can feel lonely sometimes. It can feel like this.

There you are, writer-you, engaged in a solitary endeavour, head down, writing your book.

I’m going to suggest a different way of looking at writer-you today, and I’m going to start by telling you about the time I left a big traditional publisher to set up my own business.

When I founded Practical Inspiration Publishing back in 2014, one of the first things I did was set up a weekly board meeting. I got together the CEO, CFO, CTO, COO, Sales Director and Marketing Director and demanded a report from each area, along with a summary of priorities and targets, and I picked up mercilessly on any vagueness or lack of progress. I was ON IT. There was coffee and biscuits, but not too many biscuits, because this was a meeting consisting of exactly one person: Me.

Before I left corporate life, you see, I’d taken the opportunity to ask as many people who ran their own businesses as I could what they wished they’d known when they started out, and this was one of the best tips I got — identify the roles you need for your new business and map them out, even if it’s just you right now, and then work out what you need to do for each as a priority. Then bring other people to do the stuff they’re better at than you as quickly as you can. And that’s what I did, and it’s working out pretty well.

So I speak not only as a writer myself, but as a business owner who works with business people who are writing a book to showcase their story and their expertise as part of their marketing and positioning strategy. And that might not be you. Maybe you’re a novelist, or you write children’s poetry. You might be thinking ‘I’m a writer, I’m not a business.’ But bear with me.

The dictionary defines ‘business’ as ‘work relating to the production, buying, and selling of goods or services.’ So if you’re writing a book that you’re planning to make available for sale, rather than simply writing a manuscript that’s going to stay in your bottom drawer, you’re in business. And even if you feel as fraudulent thinking of yourself as running a business as I felt dunking my chocolate chip cookie in my one-person board room in 2014, it’s still a really helpful way of thinking about what you’re doing and helping you take yourself and what you’re doing, seriously. Because if you don’t take yourself seriously, who will?

You might feel the idea of business is somehow mucky — you might feel you are a pure creator, not a crass commercialist. But if that’s the case, I put it to you that your concept of creativity is too small.

I love this quote from potter M. C. Richards:

‘The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch.’

Creativity isn’t limited to the pen or the keyboard — creative people create in every part of life with whatever comes to hand, and that includes routes to market and sales copy and pricing strategy. The commercial isn’t the opposite of the creative, it’s simply another dimension of it.

So let’s look at what your org chart might look like, for Yourbook plc.

First of all, in charge of writer-you is CEO-you. CEO-you works ON your book, not in it. CEO-you is responsible for the WHY of this business, your strategic direction, your mission and values. What shape of dent do you want to make in the universe and what do you need to put in place to make that happen? CEO-you is also responsible for ensuring that the quality of what you’re producing is high, and for making sure that all the other roles we’re going to look at today are working effectively, maybe bringing in the right skills from outside where necessary, and generally keeping things moving in the right direction.

Then reporting in to CEO-you is Marketing Director-you. This role is inescapably essential to the business of writing. Your book could be the most sensitive, lyrical novel ever written, but if nobody knows about it, it’s incomplete. A book needs readers just as much as it needs an author. And marketing is simply about finding the right readers for your book and letting them know about it.

Marketing Director-you is responsible for identifying those readers in the first place, and understanding what they need, and holding them in mind as you create the book. Knowing your market is everything for a business book of course, but it’s important for any kind of writing apart from journaling because writing is about the connection between your mind and the reader’s mind.

If you’re only interested writing for yourself, keep a journal, don’t write a book. If you’re writing for readers, then you need to be thinking about marketing. And that means being aware of your brand and its positioning, the way you communicate the value of your book to the people you want to read it, the channels and the partners and the communities you need to access to do that well.

You’ve got a few roles reporting in to Marketing Director-you: first there’s Content Marketing Manager-you. Content marketing basically means you don’t tell people how great your ideas or your writing is, because, well, you would say that wouldn’t you? Instead, you show them. And as a writer, you’ve won the lottery when it comes to creating content. Putting your stuff out into the world is terrifying, but it’s also incredibly powerful. Especially for nonfiction, it helps build an awareness of your ideas and the feedback you’ll get can be invaluable for developing those ideas and making new connections.

There’s a brilliant concept developed by Jason Roberts called Luck Surface Area. This is how he explains it:

‘The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you’re passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.’

To make it even simpler he breaks it down into an equation: L = D x T, where L is your luck surface area, D is doing something — in your case, writing your book — and T = talking about it. If all you do is talk about your book, that’s no good, of course, but most writers err on the other side: they write, but they don’t talk about it. If either of those is too low, you’re cheating yourself. And indeed you’re cheating potential readers, so get over your distaste for marketing and tell Marketing Director-you to start putting together an effective plan for how you’re going to get the word out about your book.

Also reporting in to Marketing Director-you is Social Media Manager-you and Community Manager-you — and no, neither of these mean you get to spend all day faffing around on Facebook. Social Media Manager-you is responsible for planning, scheduling and posting your content on social media and measuring its impact, and it’s Community Manager-you’s job to engage with the community of people who are becoming aware of and invested in your brand, getting them talking to each other and to other people as well as simply engaging with you — and both of these jobs start long before the book is actually published. Dickens did this brilliantly with his reading tours, I’d love to see him rocking IGTV today.

And right up there along with marketing in the echelons of things that make writers’ toes curl is sales. You can’t get more grubbily and nakedly commercial, right? if you have a traditional publisher, a lot of this will be done for you. If you’re self-publishing, it’s all on you. Sales Director-you will have to grapple with channels — Amazon is not the only game in town — and partnerships, and Sales Director-you is going to have to get happy hustling. Some of our authors get phenomenal direct bulk sales through the companies they work with or organizations where they’re speaking, or they make the book required reading for the training they run. So if you can’t hustle happily, think about bringing in someone to help.

Still with me? Just a few more.

Don’t forget CFO-you — because you have to eat. How will you pay the bills while you write, and how will you manage your costs? What return on investment are you after here? And just as importantly, where do you need to focus the resources you do have to get the best return on investment? If you had to report your spending over the last month to CEO-you, how would you feel about presenting those figures?

There’s CTO-you — I’m not talking just about IT here, although one of the first wake-up calls I had as an entrepreneur was when my printer suddenly stopped working, and I realised: I can’t call IT. Nobody’s going to come up here from the basement and fix my printer, this is now on me. If you’re not comfortable with technology and troubleshooting either get over yourself or get some help. But CTO-you’s role is much bigger than that: CTO-you is responsible for putting in place the systems you need to do your work well. Very specifically, two points: if you do nothing else, put some processes around version control, and back up your damn computer. I use BackBlaze and it has saved my life twice now.

Then there’s COO- you — yes, this is the department responsible for the actual writing. There’s writer-you, look, reporting in here. But more than that it’s also where you get to set up the processes and systems — the habits and practices — that will serve you in your writing. If writer-you is struggling with procrastination or perfectionism or terminal mojo-loss, it’s COO-you’s job to work out what’s going wrong and put it right. Maybe you need to carve out some uninterrupted writing time and get away for a retreat; maybe you just need to set the alarm 15 minutes earlier each morning, maybe you need to find a group to give you some support and accountability.

You are not at the mercy of the muse, you are responsible for figuring out how you can deliver on the commitment you’ve made you yourself, and on the commitment Marketing Director-you has made to others, or you’ll be heading for a very uncomfortable conversation with CEO-you in the corner office.

And then there’s Head of L&D-you. If there’s one thing that’s common across all businesses in the 21st century it’s that they have to become learning organisations. The expertise that made a company dominant 10 years ago can now be a liability if it’s not responding to the pace of change. But it’s not just about staying competitive, it’s also about culture: it’s about developing people who are curious, adaptable and innovative, people who can integrate new knowledge with their existing mental models, people who can make new connections. OK, maybe you don’t have a training budget, but that doesn’t mean you can’t invest in your own learning and development: what are you reading and experiencing that will take you on from what you already know? Stop scrolling and box set binging, start seeking out the books, the articles, the talks that will help you see life differently; go to an improv workshop, visit the Science Museum, fill your creative well with new imagery and insights, don’t be satisfied to write like you’ve always written, experiment, stretch yourself, get better.

And last but not least, there’s Chief Fun Officer-you — and yes that is a thing. Because if you aren’t enjoying this then, seriously, what is the point?

There’s Yourbook plc. Some of those roles will feel very natural for you, others will feel frankly terrifying. But you need to grapple with them all if you’re going to make this thing work. And it IS work.

It’s easy for other people who go to an office to type at their keyboards all day to see you working from home or in your pyjamas or in a coffee shop and think it’s not real work. It’s easy when you work alone for you to lose sight of the fact that your work matters, and not just the work itself, but how you go about it. Treating your writing like a business is a great way to stop yourself playing small.

If your writing matters to you, take it seriously, and from all the roles we’ve talked about today pick the one that scares you, the one you know you need to develop, and make it happen. Get clear on that vision. Set those goals, and track them. Get over yourself and get your marketing strategy together. Take a long hard look at your systems and processes and sort them out. Your book is a start-up, and most start-ups fail not because the idea wasn’t good enough, but because the business management wasn’t good enough.

And maybe this is your first step: when you get home, make coffee, put out the biscuits, and call your executive team together to give their reports for your first one-person, many-roles, board meeting.

Alison Jones is the Director of Practical Inspiration Publishing and author of This Book Means Business: Clever ways to plan and write a book that works harder for your business (2018). See more: www.alisonjones.com.