Writing as a business

 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.

More recently still, however, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, CoPilot and many other examples of "generative AI" have outsourced the writing to machines. If you think of writing primarily as a business, then you don't need to write the book yourself, you get the machine to do it.  And so you find ads like the one on the right, for writing prompts to feed into AI bots that will, you hope, cause them to spit out the kind of book that will sell.

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.

Many people, including, no doubt, some who accept the "writing as a business" model, are shocked and horrified at the idea of generative AI writing books for them, and speak as though AI were something evil in itself. I don't share that view. I think AI is as good or as evil as the humans who use it, and determine the uses to which it is put. If you think writing is a business and that the primary purpose of writing is to make money, then you should have no more objection to having bots write books, than to having bots assemble cars and pack cornflakes. 

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. 

----------------------

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.

On writing fiction

Here are two articles that may be of interest to writers, or potential writers of fiction. 

I've sometimes wondered whether there's any point in writing stories that no one will want to read anyway. Is it just a way of filling in time between retirement and death? "Why kill time when you can kill yourself?" as one character said in a film I saw a long time ago. So this article is an encouragement to carry on writing: 

Is writing a waste of time?  

But there is also the question of what to write, and, even more important, what not to write, and that is where this article comes in: 

Find your own well  

... which is a criticism of those who write fan fiction (fanfic) and write on National Novel-Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). 

Now I have in the past challenged people to join NaNoWriMo and write a novel in the genre of Charles Williams. 

I don't regret giving that advice, but I do see its limitations, having taken my own advice and tried to write such a novel. The critique I received, comparing it with other stories I had written, showed that trying to write a 50000-word novel in a month is not a very good idea, at least not for people who write stories the way that I do.

The problem is that journalism has deadlines, but novel-writing shouldn't, unless you are suffering from a terminal illness or are under a death sentence.

No matter how much editing, rewriting and revising one does, a novel written in a month is likely to have a lot of shortcomings that no amount of patching can fix, unless, perhaps, you are one of those people who can outline a plot well beforehand, and simply write to fill in the outline. But I'm not one of those. I often start writing a story and have no more idea than the characters in the story where it will end up.

Now I'm writing a story that leads me into unfamiliar territory, and so I have to check other books to see if I've got the background information right. One can't do that in a month when one is dependent on fortnightly.trips to the library. But I'd still like to see more stories in the genre of Charles Williams and the early Alan Garner, so, to my friends who like those authors I say:  please get writing, but do find your own well and don't try to write fan fiction.

Most of the fiction I have tried to write have been children's stories (like the early Alan Garner), and some of my reviewers have compared them to Enid Blyton's "Famous Five" stories. I don't find the comparison flattering, because I never liked the Famous Five as a child, finding the very term "Famous Five" rather pretentious and silly, and preferred Blyton's "Adventure" and "Secret" series, which had more interesting plots, even if they weren't better written. And it surely doesn't take much to write better than Enid Blyton (What a surprise!)

An online friend, whose own writing was cited in the first article mentioned above, commented that he had written a few children's books, but was deterred from preparing them for publication, or self-publishing them on a site like Smashwords, because as an academic he would not be able to put them on his CV. 

Now my academic field is one where works of fiction wouldn't be much use on one's CV, so I don't face his particular problem, but I still say don't let your manuscript moulder in a drawer or on a hard disk somewhere, but publish it on a site like Smashwords where anyone who wants to can read it. 

I mention Smashwords because publishing there is dead easy.

They give you a template. You format your manuscript according to the template, upload it and it is done. The first time I did it, it was sent back for a few tweaks, but my subsequent books were accepted first time. And, if you want to publish on Amazon's KDP, a simple Search and Replace, on a copy of the manuscript, changing every instance of "Smashwords" to "Kindle", will do it for you though Smashwords also produces the MOBI format used by Kindle readers. 

If your first few readers spot any typos you missed, you can upload a corrected version, and offer those readers a free coupon for the corrected version too.

How does this compare with commercial publishing? 

If you don't need to put it on your CV, I think it compares quite well.

For my first children's novel I queried dozens of literary agents who  said they handled children's books. I didn't get any rejections slips. None of them rejected it, they didn't want to read it at all. I thought writing books was more fun than writing query letters, and gave that up. 

I have had a couple of academic books published by university presses. The most recent one, where I collaborated with two other authors, did not produce a single review, at least not any that I have seen. My most recent children's book, The Enchanted Grove (ISBN 978-1-920707-65-1), has had several reviews on the GoodReads site and elsewhere. I thought it might appeal to fans of Alan Garner or Charles Williams but most of the reviewers who compare it to other books compared it to the The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper.

OK, these are not reviews from academic specialists in children's literature (I'd love to have a couple of those, if any such people could be persuaded to read it), and even more I'd love to have reviews from kids in the target age group (9-12), but at least there are reviews, whereas the book published by traditional academic publishers produced none. And while not all reviews are useful, a good review (which is not necessarily the same as a flattering one), can show you how to write better next time.