I’m tired now.
It’s been a busy few weeks, filled with writing and with the effort it’s taken to support my very fun Kickstarter for “1101 Digital Stories in an Analog World” (taking late orders for a few more days), and then even more mental effort spent learning about and setting up my direct store at skyfoxpublishing.com (which is now live!). Doing that kind of detailed work is particularly taxing for me. I’m generally good at it, but it takes all my focus, and since I am not sure what I’m doing much of the time it also comes with a side dish of that anxiety that gets tangled up with that weird sense of uncertainty that tells me I’m out on a tightrope without a net (even when it’s clear the world will not end if anything goes wrong).
When I’m in that kind of period—learning about and setting up business infrastructure and whatnot—the flowstate I achieve is different from the flowstate I can get into when I’m writing. A great session spent writing will often leave me invigorated, whereas a session spent in deep focus around a tool is always taxing.
On top of this work, I’ve attended a series of Las Vegas Aces basketball games (Go Aces!) that have left me more drained than I’d anticipated. Playoff basketball is insanely intense, and after each game comes a period of decompression.
So, yeah, I’m tired.
I say this now because, like many other roles in life, I can report fully that the daily grind of being an independently published writer is one of energy management.
I am my business, after all, and my business is me.
Same for you, of course, assuming you are a small business, anyway.
If I’m not “working,” then no one is.
Of course, the idea of how I see my business might be different than the way you see it. This is a subject I’ve been thinking about since Brigid (my daughter, collaborator, and really fine writer on her own) and I discussed the topic a few weeks back.
Exactly what is a writer’s business?
How do we build it?
Why do we build it?
If we’re doing it right, anyway?
Not every small business is the same, and even within each category there can be wild differences. Writers are no different. In fact, given the Million Ways to Succeed that I’ve talked about, it’s not hard to argue that there are no two writers’ businesses that are exactly the same. The ins and outs of my business are different from Brigid’s, for example. And we’re both different from my friend Lisa Silverthorne’s.
Deconstructing this is an interesting thought experiment, though.
Why is it that way?
As an aside, I’ve come to realize that I am a slow thinker.
This doesn’t mean I don’t have quick reactions to things or hot takes on whatever the latest controversy of the day might be. It just means that I don’t put much stock in those hot takes—even my own—until I have time to let the boiling-hot ideas inherent in those takes settle to a simmer. This is probably why I’m not a huge fan of conversations on social media. I tried to hang with the crowd back in the day, but I find hot takes and quick thinking are generally flawed and are mostly distorted by people’s individual needs to feel whatever they want to feel at the time. That’s all fine, I suppose, but that kind of thing makes me mostly unhappy, and then just wears me out.
It’s also why I’m not a big fan of today’s discourse around AI in the arts.
Enough on that one for now, though.
When it comes to my writing business, this slow thinking manifests itself this way.
A week or two back, Brigid told me she thought the entire idea of a writer developing their business meant simply that the generic you, as the writer, decide what tools you are going to use to show people the cool stuff that you have made. This fits her simplified concept that the job of a creative is simply to make cool stuff, and then show that cool stuff to other people who think it’s cool, too.
I continue to like that.
Simplifications FTW.
After thinking about it for a while, it makes even more sense. Beyond that, I find the concept to be extremely useful in the process of making decisions about my own business.
I am not you. You are not me.
There are, after all, ten thousand tools either one of us might use, and even just the fact that we get only 24 hours a day means that neither one of us can use them all. So, what criteria should I use to decide which one(s) to pursue, and what priority order to pursue them in? And why would I pick something different from you? We’re both writers, after all. If something “works,” for me, why wouldn’t it work for you? Even more complicated, if something “works” for me, why might I still not do it?
For some—for most, even—the business answer to prioritization is most obviously focused on whatever is most lucrative. That idea makes a lot of sense on first blush. The idea of being a businessperson is steeped in the idea of cash, right? More cash, better business. So it’s a good place to start.
But I find that, in the end, that mindset doesn’t resonate with me. I can spin myself up around the idea of making money, but the energy I get from it doesn’t last long. I get tired faster when I’m doing something mostly for the idea of money.
In the old days, I didn’t understand why that was, but now I do.
It turns out that I don’t write for fortune (*). Really I don’t.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
It’s just not me.
(*) In the three-tiered stool of why we write, the choices are Fortune, Fame, and Freedom. Of course, the three have a relationship. Gaining enough Fame can create Fortune, or creating enough Fame or Fortune can also result in more Freedom. But I find it valuable to keep the one that’s important to me at the forefront simply because my personality makes me unhappy if I get these things out of whack. I’m fine with some degree of attention (Fame). I also like to eat well and do the fun things it takes money to accomplish (Fortune). But neither of those is my true wheelhouse.
I write for Freedom.
Or at least I prefer a career that allows me the Freedom of writing whatever I want to write over the concepts of Fame and Fortune. This is probably why I like being independently published so much.
It’s also why I like the idea of using “your business is that collection of things you use to present your readers with cool stuff” as the basis to answer the question of what business practices I should develop (and when). If I phrase the question around the concept of how I can best present my cool stuff to the readers I want to present it to, things get clearer to me.
If I do that, I can look at any idea and ask questions that make me happy.
Questions like:
- Is this going to help the people I want to reach find my work?
- Is the work it will take creative enough to make me happy doing it for a long time (can I get excited enough about the effort to sustain it)?
- Can I afford it right now?
- Is this the best thing to work on today?
You get the idea.
Thinking about those questions lets me see immediately why my business might look different from yours. I am a different person from you. You are different from me. Our readers are probably different, so the steps to find our markets might be different. You might love tinkering with ad spends and back-end dashboards. I do not. I might enjoy book design in Word, while you might find that process makes you want to gouge your eyeballs out. Our financial situations might be different, as well as our tolerances for risk. And, finally (or since the list of differences can be infinite, maybe not so finally), our businesses might be in completely different states of maturity. Successful or not, I may just not be ready to undertake the effort you undertook.
Looking back at decisions I’ve made over the years, I have almost always (eventually) undertaken a basic approach that says that whatever I decide to do will always make me excited by the idea of how it touches readers. I like Kickstarter, for example, because it’s a great tool to get directly tied to and communicate with backers. It’s also something completely under my control. I find it fun. I like creating Kickstarter “marketing.” Same for Patreon. I’ve also always liked the idea of a direct store for the same reasons.
All three of these tools (like a reader’s newsletter) are much more intimate than a book sold on one of the wide channels (Amazon, Apple, Kobo, or Barnes and Noble, for example).
Don’t get me wrong—selling wide is the bomb, and I could take some time and expand my thoughts about this into the route I took to pursue the use of Amazon ads at one point, but that conversation waters down the point of the moment, which is that my personal tastes when it comes to showing my cool stuff to people who are also likely to think it’s cool run toward the ideas around these more intimate tools.
And, yet…
Why has it taken me so long to get to the point I’m at?
While I started pursuing Kickstarters several years ago, for example, I waited until very early this year to crack open the Patreon shell. And I’m only now kicking the tires on my own direct store.
Again, why so long?
I think the answer lies partially in that aspect of me that makes me say I’m a long thinker, and another part of it is because I haven’t had this guidepost about what a writer’s business is to focus my thoughts against.
People who know me would say that I’m analytical, and that’s not wrong except in that it’s not complete. I am analytical, but as my Clifton Strengths says, I’m not so much analytical as I am interested in ideas. I like dissecting systems, and I’m generally pretty good at it. But I think that’s because, as I’m analyzing things, I’m looking for new ideas inside the data. I like the idea of seeing truths that aren’t so obvious. Analysis, you see, is just a tool. An end to a means. It’s these ideas that get me excited.
As I look back on things, I think my path to these business structures is more proof that I’m writing for Freedom. It explains why this whole “make your cool stuff, then show people your cool stuff” concept fits my view of living a creative life quite well, even though I wouldn’t have put it that way myself. The idea that a writer’s business is fundamentally a delivery platform the writer creates to show people their cool stuff makes total sense. Looking at it that way makes the design and creation of these platforms forms of creativity all by themselves.
Because that’s what they are.
The point here is to look at every option through your own lens.
If you’re a writer focused on recognition (Fame), you’re probably not going to be interested in building your own store unless you can find ways to use it to increase your profile. If you can’t, then building a store will draw resentment. But once you can see how a store helps you raise that profile, then you’re suddenly all in. Same for finance. If you’re in the game for Fortune, building a store will need to have a chance to pay off quickly, or else its mere existence could put you deep into the blues.
For me, who is interested MOSTLY in control and creative freedom, the key point that changed the work of creating it from a chore to one of more joy was realizing that (again for me), I wasn’t doing it to make a big profit. Once I looked at the idea as a way to control my own destiny, the work to design the store became fun (and even creative within the bounds of the tools I used).
Of course, a direct store is a financial instrument, but looking at it the right way turned it into a creative thing all by itself.
A store’s interface has a vibe, after all.
And my business is me. Since I’m the one designing (or at least decorating) that interface, that vibe says something about me.
Now that I’m at least partially in tune with how to use this tool (the word partially is doing a lot of work in that sentence), and now that I’m fully in the mindset that I’m designing something for other people who think my work is cool, I’m finding the creative aspect of it to be something that scratches that itch I have to be me.
If it’s cool to me, it will be cool to people who like what I do.
If someone doesn’t like what I do, well, then they won’t show up!
Which is kind of nice.
I could make the same kind of analysis of my foray here into Patreon. Or Special Edition hard covers. Or…
Because I’ve been fiddling with all of those ideas for some time. Years, really.
So, yeah, why did it take so long to do those things?
It’s this: two and three years ago, I viewed things incorrectly for my own values. Despite myself, I was viewing Patreon pages and Stores as ways to sell things rather than as ways to do cool things for people who like the things I do. And for a person who writes for Freedom, that’s no fun. Until I changed my perspective of the tools, just the idea of using them made my bones ache. Sure, all the cool kids were doing them, but I didn’t want to.
Over time, though, I’ve changed my (very) slow thinking.
When Brigid put things in her viewpoint, and said that a writer’s business boils down to the things they decide to use to show their cool stuff to cool people, things really clicked.
The reason I’ve done these things as I’ve done them is that my body rejected them until my (again very slow) thinking came around to the mindset it needed.
My business is me, after all.
Your business is you.
I don’t know if this will help you or not, but I think it should.
To boil it down, I like this idea of a writer’s business (or anyone’s, for that matter) being the tools and structures that that writer is comfortable using to highlight their cool stuff, mostly because it changes the focus from one with the goal of “selling” to one with a goal of “providing.” Even if your goal is Fortune, the task of achieving that goal is going to revolve around finding the people who want what you’re selling. (Yes, this is parsing things a bit)
I also like realizing that the tools that resonate with me do so because they are the ones most closely related to the way I view my Freedom as a writer, and that the tools that resonate with you might be different for all the reasons I’ve already put forward.
Newsletters, Patreon pages, Kickstarters, and my direct store are all things that (source platform aside) I can, to a greater degree, control. They give me Freedom. If you’re interested in Fame or Fortune, you may need to approach them with a different mindset than I do, or you may need to simply use a different set of tools.
Don’t get me wrong.
I’m not stupid.
I like selling books. And more sales is more better, of course (I come out of corporate America, right?), but the fact of the matter is that my personality says that if I’m not making things I think are cool, then I’m not going to make them for very long before burning out.
So think about it for yourself. Stew on it over lunch tomorrow.
Whatever business you are in, whatever work you do, why are you there?
Freedom, Fame, or Fortune?
If you’re willing to sit on that idea a bit longer, then ask yourself if the things you are doing today are hitting those needs the right way. If not, is the problem your own mindset, or is it actually the tool or project itself that is the problem?
I’m guessing that the answer might help you find it less stressful to make decisions about which of those Million Ways to Succeed you can ignore (for now, anyway), and which to focus on (for now).
I am a human. Not an AI. You can tell because keep a Patreon page where I talk about writing and being a writer (among other things). In other words, I post a lot of things there before I post them here. I also share occasional work in progress for Patrons only, and give special discounts and sometimes even free books to Patrons at various levels. If you’d like to support me–or just this blog–you can do so by clicking here:
