In my long and unsuccessful career as a fiction writer[1] I have read many books that purport to give advice to writers and would-be writers. Some of the advice has been good, some bad, though people might disagree with my criteria for what is good or bad, but one of the worst pieces of advice (in my opinion) was that "writing is a business", and that writers must therefore do market research to find what is selling at the moment, and write books that will sell.
And the "traditional" publishing world works like that. Authors (or their agents) submit their work, and the first question they ask, in evaluating the work, is "will it sell?" Though they sometimes make mistakes, their experience of the book market is such that they usually have a pretty good idea of what will sell, and most of them have a marketing and publicity section that works hard to get the book into the hands of willing buyers.
If they don't think your book will sell, but you still want to publish it, until about 20 years ago you had two options -- vanity publishing or self-publishing. Vanity publishers would publish your book for a fee, which would cover their costs of production and also their profit. They do minimal marketing, that is up to you. In self-publishing, you get your book printed bound and sell it by whatever means you can.
More recently self-publishing has become easier with print-on-demand for paper books, and ebooks. You submit your book, they print and distribute it at no cost to you, and keep a percentage of each book sold, to cover their costs and profit. And that leaves you free to decide whether writing, for you, is a business or not.
If you see writing as a business, and that is what you are looking for, you will find the kind of thing advertised on the right here. And no, I'm not getting paid for displaying the ad or providing the link, I'm just putting it there to illustrate the "writing as a business" model, and to show where it leads.
But the reason I write is not primarily to make money. It is more like a conversation between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in which one of them, I forget who, said that if they they wanted more of the kind of stories they liked, they should have to write them themselves. I write because I want more of the kind of stories I like, and I write for the kind of people who like those kinds of stories. I would rather sell 50 books to people who like the stories in them and enjoy them than sell 5000 books to people who will never read them.
If I see writing as a business, then I must write what sells, or get a bot to write the books for me. But I don't see it primarily as a business. I don't want to write what sells; I want to sell what I write to those who might enjoy reading it. That means targeted advertising, in order to find the people who might like such a book, and tell them that it exists and where to find it. But how?
There are also ads for bots that will run your advertising for you. Sell more books.
Out of curiosity I followed a couple of them up, and saw the kind of questions they asked in order to "draw up a business plan" for advertising. And the questions did not inspire confidence. They asked how many did you want to sell and how much did you want to spend. They did not ask what I was selling.
At the beginning of this article I put "traditional publishers" in quotation marks, because while most people speak of the alternative to self-publishing as "traditional publishing", it is not really "traditional", but is rather commercial publishing. Traditional publishers, while they hoped to make a living from publishing, did not have that as their primary aim. They very often started their publishing house with the aim of making certain kinds of books available, usually the kind of books they liked to read, or books that they thought people ought to read.
When the founders died, others took over, sometimes members of their family, or sometimes partners. Sometimes the original vision would remain, or in other cases it would become diluted as the publishing house was run by people who had different interests or a different vision. But though some of the names remain, very often the vision doesn't. If you look at the back of the title page of recently published book, you will find the publisher information, which may have the name of a "traditional" publisher, but you discover that it is a "Hatchette Company" or some other part of some other large conglomerate. If you really want a "traditional" publisher you might need to look for a small independent press, and not one that is a small part of a large conglomerate whose interests may extend into other fields than publishing.
The problem for those who don't see writing primarily as a business is to find readers for the stuff they write. And that is often passed on by word of mouth -- people who liked a book telling others, recommending it to others, writing a bit about it on social media, asking for the book in libraries and bookshops, or even donating used copies.
So if you've read any of my books and liked them, please tell others, discuss them with friends, share links to them on social media and if possible write a review and post it on a blog, or a site like GoodReads.
And if you haven't read any of them, have a look at the right-hand column of this page, where they are listed, or see my author page here.
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Notes
[1] My long and unsuccessful career as an author began when, at the age of about 5-6 I began to write fan fiction based on my favourite stories at the time (some of which attempts I still have). I wrote short stories for school essays, and made a few attempts at writing novels, mostly unfinished. I wrote tracts, mafazine articles and news articles as a journalist, and a non-fiction book, Black Charismatic Anglicans, which was published by Unisa Press in 1990. The first novel I actually completed was Of Wheels and Witches, completed in 1999, published as an ebook in 2014. A second edition is due to appear some time.
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