Sawyer - Business 101

Business 101

The Every Day Novelist

by J. Daniel Sawyer

AWP Nonfiction

A division of ArtisticWhispers Productions, Inc.

2016 J. Daniel Sawyer

All Rights Reserved

Book Design by ArtisticWhispers

Diagrams and Illustrations 2016 Kitty NicIaian

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For Michael and Ben, who provoked it
With special thanks to ML Buchman
Who helped make it what it is

The Every Day Novelist

J. Daniel Sawyer

Part of the dream for most fiction writersand certainly most fiction writers who pick up a book like thisis to get their work to market. To get published. To have readers pick up their book off a shelf (in a library, or a bookstore, or an online store) and read it, and enjoy it, and talk about it.

And, eventually, to be able to have an audience that follows us from book to book. Maybe even one that will pay us to keep writingmaybe pay enough that we can write as our main career (if we want to).

Once upon a time, getting published looked, from the outside, like it was the difficult part of the processmysterious from the outside, filled with strange rituals and procedures (queries, partials, galleys, etc.) that one must engage in to please the gatekeepers (the editors who must like your work in order for you to have a hope of selling it). You had to get good enough to get their attention, and then you were into the secret world behind the veil.

Of course, as is the case with any game with its own rules, these procedures weren't as opaque and strange from the inside as they were from the outside. But getting published was still a long, complicated process, large swaths of which were outside of the author's control.

The world doesn't work that way anymore. Oh, you can still do things that way, but if your goal is to get published, then taking it through that old-world process is doing things the hard way. Getting published now is as easy as uploading an ebook to KDP or Kobo. Of course, once you do that, you're not just a writer anymore, you're also a publisher.

Whether you go the old route or the new route, a long-term, sustainable career depends on both your business savvy and your writing chops. Later books in this series will deal with different elements of storytelling. This (as you may have surmised from the title) is a book about business.

Specifically, about the conceptual end of business. The finer points (marketing, strategy, leverage, managing subcontractors, creating systems, dealing with taxes, contracts, etc.) are all important, and deserving of a book in their own right, and that's where a lot of business guides start out.

But those are particulars. Like many other authors moving into the middle-era of their career, I've learned the hard way that a focus on the particulars will lead you into one blind alley after another unless you also learn a few basic, foundational premises.

These are habits of thought and ways of looking at the world that set the stage for practicing all those other, particular skills. They will change the way you view those skills, and they may change which ones you think are important.

These foundational premises are tough. Not because they're particularly complicated, but because they form a whole new worldview that, in many cases, runs directly counter to all the intuitions we develop as employees.

If you've worked as an employee for most of your life (and your job didn't involve business strategy or consulting or other high-level positions that gave you a real bird's-eye-view of how business works), or if you're a writer of fiction or narrative nonfiction trying to get your business bearings, or if you've been traditionally published and you're trying to wrap your head around how things work on the other side of the industry, this is your Business 101.

Of the foundational premises we'll walk through in this book, the most foundational one is this:

Because you're a writer, you are a business owner.

Obvious, right? So obvious that you'd probably already figured that out before you came to this book. I mean, it does have Business 101 right on the cover.

And besides, if you're indie publishing anything, you're selling things into retail, and selling=business, right? And, if you're traditionally published, you're still selling thingsyou're just selling your stories to publishers, and that's like wholesaling, right?

But it's one thing to say Of course I'm in business and it's another thing to think like a business owner. That takes some education, and more than that, it takes forming new habits of thinking.

Employee Thinking

When you're an employee, there are a few thought patterns that are so habitual that even pointing out their existence seems...a little weird.

1. You think in terms of hierarchy

   When you're an employee, you're selling your time and capabilities. You get the money you need to live, your employer gets a priority-claim on your talent and attention during certain hours of the day. When your employer (or your boss, who's also an employee) says jump, you say how high. If it's a high-pressure job, you ask how high after you're already on the way up.

   If you get conflicting instructions from two different bosses, you sort your priorities based on who has the most authority (or who can make your life most unpleasant).

   You work within a social ecosystem that has incentivessuch as bonuses, promotion, accolades, and awardsthat help guide your behavior, and when you're not reaching for an incentive of one sort or another, you tend to slack off and do just what you need to to get by (at least, if you're statistically averagethere are exceptional workers in every field).

   In every way you can see, and in many ways you can't, your agency is outsourced up the hierarchical ladder, because the person who writes the paychecks makes the rulesand if you want to keep getting your paychecks, you have to play by their rules.

2. You think in terms of tasks

   As part of the hierarchy at your workplace, you have a job description. It outlines your area of responsibility. The things outside that area aren't your problemyou might be able to help with them, and in some workplaces this is encouraged, but if something falls outside your bailiwick your power to effect it tends to be quite limited.

   Inside that area of responsibility, you have tasks to perform, and you must perform them in a timely fashion so that your employer is happy with you.

   Whether it's empty all the garbage bins in the shop before lunch time or get the accounting done by the 15th so we can cut paychecks or inspect today's batch of spot-welds to make sure they'll hold under load, you daily rhythm is driven by your task listswhich are formulated either by your boss, or by you, in accordance with the limits of your job description.

   
   

3. You equate effort with outcome

   As an employee, you mentally equate the amount of effort and/or time that you spend at your job with a guaranteed, reliable payout (one that the government will enforce). If you work four hours for ten bucks an hour, you get forty dollars (minus taxes) for that work the next time your boss does payroll.