The Business Writer

If most writers are like Writer Abroad, then they spend a lot of time alternating between writing and dreaming about writing, but they don't spend a lot of time being business people.

But shockingly, nothing is much more business-y than publishing a book.

Writer Abroad should know. She’s going through the process now. And after seven years of writing and editing her book, she was all ready to upload it to her printer (yippee!) only to discover she must enter things like bank accounts, tax numbers, and metadata first. 

Her surprise at this realization surprised her. After all, Writer Abroad has spent over a decade writing copy for advertising brands, articles for magazines, and essays for anthologies. But somehow her book felt different. It felt especially creative, like it was all hers, and so it came as quite a shock to realize, oh yeah, her book is a business thingy too.

It's a product people will be able to buy that she has spent over seven years and $2,000 to produce. But the investment didn’t seem like much to her since it was a labor of love. And that’s when Writer Abroad realized something: She could spend her life working on labors of love—and actually sell them. Ok, maybe she’ll only sell them to two people—like her mom and dad. Or sell them to the two people that are on that mailing list she just got around to realizing she should have. But you know what? Two sales or two hundred thousand, it seems like a pretty good life. One that she is glad she has decided to live.

Do you think of your writing as a business?