Writers are easily encouraged to be entrepreneurs.\u00a0 And yet, if you asked them about it they would maybe look at you blankly…<\/p>\n
Invention:<\/strong> First the writer invents a book, a most enthralling product which he or she loves.\u00a0 It is the best book that they can imagine making.\u00a0 Her mother reads it and says wow, his best friend says man you are going to be famous with this one.\u00a0 Then they try to sell it.\u00a0 They make a product.<\/strong><\/p>\n Selling Self:<\/strong> You could self publish. Make a cover, do the layout, pay a printer to produce 200 or 2000 books.\u00a0 Then they rest in boxes stacked up in his lounge and he sells them to friends, on the internet, to bookshops, at markets.\u00a0 The probability of success is low.\u00a0 This is the reason why self publishing can be referred to as vanity publishing.\u00a0 These days self publishing is done more risk free on the internet.\u00a0 Directly to Amazon or PDF.<\/p>\n Success?: <\/strong>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.\u00a0 Because that means that you don\u2019t get the basics wrong, that means that you do not alienate your reader\/buyer with a product that jars.<\/p>\n The map for the road to success:<\/strong> Let\u2019s 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.\u00a0 The agent must like it and she must think that there is a market or a need for the book \u2013 then the agent asks to see the rest of the book.<\/p>\n The bollards in the roads to success<\/strong>: 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. \u00a0Does the writer resubmit the book unchanged to a different agent? At first, yes.\u00a0 But after 5 or 10 or 20 rejections, probably not.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 These are books that really are just badly written or books for who the timing is wrong.\u00a0 This is a big failure and the best advice is that you should put the book aside and start writing a new one.\u00a0 This is difficult because you may have spent a year or two or more writing it.\u00a0 But if nobody wants it, then nobody wants it.<\/p>\n Market analysis, focus groups:<\/strong> The agent contains all of these functions.\u00a0 The agent attends publishing industry networking events, has friends who are publishers and acts on behalf of other published authors.\u00a0 The agent is experienced in taking a product to market.\u00a0 Where a book is accepted, it is almost certain that the writer will be asked to rewrite parts of the book.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The author does not receive the cover price, the author receives a minor percentage of the cover price.<\/p>\n Failure: <\/strong>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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Failure to repeat the success of a published work.<\/p>\n Success:<\/strong> A book is just like any other invention.\u00a0 Writers know this or rather most writers know this.\u00a0 They can sell a book that people need; that readers want to read.<\/p>\n If there is an interest in ancient Greece spurred by happenings in the modern world, then a book about Greece \u2013 whether it features time travellers going to the ancient time, or historical romantic fiction \u2013 will have a much bigger chance of succeeding at the agent barrier, climb through the publisher barrier, and be sold.\u00a0 Failure is a stage in the pathway to success.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n That other success<\/strong>:\u00a0 The writer loves writing, loves inventing.\u00a0 Even when there is no commercial expectation or history of successful publication, writers write. That is the joy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Writers are easily encouraged to be entrepreneurs.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It is the best book that they can imagine making.\u00a0 Her mother reads it and says wow, … Continue reading Are writers entrepreneurs or business people? They are certainly inventors.<\/span>