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.