Balancing The Art & Business Of Writing

Balancing the Art & Business of WritingWriting a book is part art, part business. Your book is a publishing masterpiece, a work of art. It is also a commodity, something that is bought and sold on the market.

Most authors love the "art" and "craft" part of writing. They love turning a draft into a finished manuscript. It's the selling and advertising part that feels kind of "dirty" to an author.

Yet, if you study financially successful writers you will find they do more than creating good books. They create a good business by:

Creating multiple sources of income (speaking, selling merchandise, movies, etc.)

Carefully crafting a brand and promoting that brand with marketing and advertising

Utilizing a team to handle the non-creative parts

Upgrade your vision from author to authorpreneur

Authors shouldn't have to choose between writing and entrepreneurship. They need both to become financially successful and have a stable foundation for their creative efforts. You can begin making that mental upgrading by changing your language, brand, and actions. Some small changes that you can take today to make that change:

Study the life stories (and marketing materials, like websites) of financially successful authors

Write down three things you would be doing as an author if you were a financially successful author.

Identify one thing you could do from the list above, even if it's a very small step.

Write a new author's bio outlining everything you wanted to accomplish an author

2. Start shipping more books

If you look at successful authors, you will notice one obvious thing: They write a lot of books. Having this inventory of books gives these authors a distinct advantage over other authors. Those advantages include:

Keep loyal readers happy

More opportunities for sales

Establish and strengthen your brand

Develop a portfolio to improve your standing with clients or a publishing

4. Decrease non-essential work

Being an author means more than writing. It involves a lot of administrative work (marketing, bookkeeping, legal paperwork, etc.). Maintaining these administrative work is important, but it can also detract you from your essential work, writing. The more books you have, the more you have to keep up with.

This is why many successful authors outsource. They have personal assistants, agents, etc. that handle the non-essential work that takes up too much of their time. This way they can focus more on their essential work.

5. Keep a lookout for new opportunities

Entrepreneurs look for opportunities. They don't sit and hope for opportunities. This is the opposite of the way many authors work. Most authors actually work the opposite. They actually look for the "best-selling" book and hope opportunities will flow to them.

This isn't the way you build a sustainable business. Build a business by looking for opportunities to leverage what you have (writing skills, your books, and network) to grow