Writers are easily encouraged to be entrepreneurs.  And yet, if you asked them about it they would maybe look at you blankly…

Invention: First the writer invents a book, a most enthralling product which he or she loves.  It is the best book that they can imagine making.  Her mother reads it and says wow, his best friend says man you are going to be famous with this one.  Then they try to sell it.  They make a product.

Selling Self: You could self publish. Make a cover, do the layout, pay a printer to produce 200 or 2000 books.  Then they rest in boxes stacked up in his lounge and he sells them to friends, on the internet, to bookshops, at markets.  The probability of success is low.  This is the reason why self publishing can be referred to as vanity publishing.  These days self publishing is done more risk free on the internet.  Directly to Amazon or PDF.

Success?: successful self publishers to paper books or to e-books will tell you that one needs an editor, rigorous, repeated copy-editing, layout and cover design.  Because that means that you don’t get the basics wrong, that means that you do not alienate your reader/buyer with a product that jars.

The map for the road to success: Let’s presume the old model of book selling, where the author wants to publish a paper book. The author must work through an agent to who the writer submits the first 3 chapters of the completed manuscript which is then assessed.  The agent must like it and she must think that there is a market or a need for the book – then the agent asks to see the rest of the book.

The bollards in the roads to success: For every manuscript that the agent accepts, he or she will reject 20 or 50. If the agent rejects it the writer may discard the book entirely.  Does the writer resubmit the book unchanged to a different agent? At first, yes.  But after 5 or 10 or 20 rejections, probably not.  For every JK Rowling where resubmitting again and again will eventually lead to the manuscript’s genius being realised, there are hundreds of products for which there is no need.  These are books that really are just badly written or books for who the timing is wrong.  This is a big failure and the best advice is that you should put the book aside and start writing a new one.  This is difficult because you may have spent a year or two or more writing it.  But if nobody wants it, then nobody wants it.

Market analysis, focus groups: The agent contains all of these functions.  The agent attends publishing industry networking events, has friends who are publishers and acts on behalf of other published authors.  The agent is experienced in taking a product to market.  Where a book is accepted, it is almost certain that the writer will be asked to rewrite parts of the book.  The agent then sells the book to a publisher who will print and bind and make pretty and distribute and price and discount and sell.  The author does not receive the cover price, the author receives a minor percentage of the cover price.

Failure: Many published authors talk about the failures along the way, the first book that they could not get anyone to publish, a lot of rejection. It is a hard school to come through and writers cannot be thin skinned.  In fact, if you are at all a talented writer the probability is that you need to get the first book out of the way to make place for the second. There is more failure, failure to get the first version of a book accepted.  Failure to repeat the success of a published work.

Success: A book is just like any other invention.  Writers know this or rather most writers know this.  They can sell a book that people need; that readers want to read.

If there is an interest in ancient Greece spurred by happenings in the modern world, then a book about Greece – whether it features time travellers going to the ancient time, or historical romantic fiction – will have a much bigger chance of succeeding at the agent barrier, climb through the publisher barrier, and be sold.  Failure is a stage in the pathway to success.  It sometimes takes years to become an overnight success, when the book is accepted by an agent and then accepted by a publisher and eventually made into an actual book with a cover and chapters and a bar code.

That other success:  The writer loves writing, loves inventing.  Even when there is no commercial expectation or history of successful publication, writers write. That is the joy.

Some mornings I break my routine but this is seldom a choice.  Usually, like today, it is the result of lots of little things.  My husband has to be at work, and so do I, and the children are on holiday and I have the whole day at the office tomorrow but for today I need to be here for a few hours.  I arrived at the office at 7:30.

The world is different.

The front doors of the building are not open.

The best bit is the weather today.  Outside my 8^th floor window the mist swirls and I cannot see the Tyne River as I usually can and I am taken in my mind to moments.  My childhood in the Cape winter in the beautiful nothing of morning when nobody exists but me and wet oak leaves and my skin.  There is the morning in Lausanne when I was lost trying to find my way home from a bakery and the warm loaf was softening under my arm. Early morning in Cape Town with sea scented fog.  Mornings of a lifetime crowd around me.

It is not a choice, but I should not resist it. The side doors are open.  There is parking up the side road until 9:30.

I ask questions and I am not alone in this, but I don’t think that enough people ask simple questions.  When headline earnings are declared or a company declares that an executive director has received (paid himself?) a bonus I want to understand the pathway that led to that number.  Not everything, but it has to make a little bit of sense.  I want common sense to be regarded as a high art, more valued than spin or shiny brochures.

If a business sells unnecessary insurance to a customer, is that bad business practise?

On the one hand the customer should check what they are buying and if they don’t need the insurance they should say no.  Why does the customer say yes?  The salesperson makes a compelling case, or presents the information in such a way that the default settings sound plausible.  Is this immoral?  The buyer may have real needs that go unfulfilled because they have bought this unnecessary product.  Should the seller aspire to a moral code of conduct or is this a case of buyer beware, and that is where the onus remains?

In a way this is the heart of the problem.  The seller is only able to do this mis-selling if the seller is a trusted entity.  The seller is only able to do this misspelling if the buyer is bamboozled by terminology that sounds complex and clever and by marketing material that holds together.

This would not happen if the trusted entity is in fact trustworthy i.e. acting morally.  In a world where some companies act morally and others do not the best defence is an enquiring mind, a confidently enquiring mind.  If large numbers of buyers ask simple questions until they understand what the seller is trying to sell, it does not even require training but it does require confidence.  Confidence in simple maths will always wash off the befuddlement that is conjured by a confident salesman.  And if the confidence is trickery it will break up and be exposed but if there is something sensible under it then that too will come to light.

So I repeat.  If a business sells unnecessary insurance to a customer, is that bad business practise?

If the customer remains forever under the illusion that the insurance was necessary, and feels reassured and happy then maybe the insurance was a good thing.  This could fall under the category of doing a bad thing for a good reason…. but.  But it will only remain good if the customer never finds out that things might have been otherwise, never discovers that he/she has been duped.

When the customer finds out that they have been lied to or cheated, stolen from, made out to be a fool, all happiness is gone.  The customer will probably not return any time soon.

Selling someone stuff that they don’t need is short-term-ism.  It is usually driven by corporate decree or by the type of measurement applied to the employee doing the selling and the incentives offered to such a person.  The employee is acting for short term gain.  By extension, the middle managers and the top executives are demanding this type of short term-ism.  This is a sort of Ponzi scheme that relies for continued success on a steady supply of fresh punters to be duped.

This is one part of the question.  The other follows.

For a company that sells shares on the stock exchange, sales numbers feed into the public numbers, the measures that are used by people who buy shares to gauge the health and profitability of a company.  When extreme short-term thinking feeds into the public numbers, the public numbers may look good but there is no easy way to for the share buyer to interrogate those numbers and determine whether the “growth is sustainable”.  And that is just the honest share buyers.  It is possible that the share buyers are aware of the share price – sales numbers – Ponzi scheme but they want to get in, and out again, and make a profit on the trade.

Very little exists within the scheme to encourage long term thinking or honesty and there is no way for me to change that.  But everyone who comes into contact with these numbers can be confident enough in their own native intelligence to ask why and how and for whose benefit.