Business

We now reach the third leg of the professional-writing stool: Business.

At first glance, this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the writing part of writing-as-a-profession. Business is all about the profession part, right? And logically, that means that writers who don’t care about “having a writing career” don’t have to pay any attention to the business stuff.

The problem with that logic is that the business end of writing includes stuff like copyright law, which affects you whether or not you are selling your writing. It also includes things like “generating buzz” for that story you are giving away free, because “generating buzz” (and any other way of getting new, unfamiliar readers to read your stories) is functionally the same as doing publicity and marketing for a book that someone else is selling.

In other words, even a writers who are not in any way part of “the writing business” have a business leg on their three-legged stool. It’s just a really short leg. If you’re giving everything away for free, you probably should be aware of copyright laws and the existence of the Creative Commons  and their license agreements, at the very least. Because unless you are planning to be Emily Dickinson and not show your work to anybody, but just leave it for your heirs to deal with, ignoring the business leg of the stool can run you into a fairly wide variety of possible troubles (as most of you probably figured out the minute you saw “copyright laws” in that second sentence).

It ought to be obvious that once you start planning to get paid for your writing, though, you need to pay attention to the business leg. (Note that I said “planning to get paid,” not “get paid.” A lot of useful business-type stuff starts happening long before you actually sell anything. Like keeping submission records and tracking expenses.) Unfortunately, this is not at all obvious to some people, and right there, we run into the first batch of writers who run into trouble because they ignore this leg of the stool.

The first group is composed of writers who don’t think they have to pay attention to business until they reach some threshold level, usually either selling their first novel or getting paid a certain amount. For the first set, selling short stories or poetry “doesn’t count;” for the second set, anything under some arbitrary personal limit, like $25 per story or $100 per year, “doesn’t count.” I met one author who even arranged to take the advance on her first novel in copies, in the mistaken belief that as long as she didn’t get an actual check, it wasn’t income and “didn’t count.” The trouble is that while the IRS is unlikely to notice that you sold a short story to a semiprozine for $10 last year, it actually does count as part of your income. (And that writer who took her entire advance in copies was really annoyed when her publisher quite rightly sent her a 1099 stating that they had reported the advance to the IRS, even though the writer “hadn’t gotten that money at all.” I spent some time explaining to her that the tax people didn’t care whether she spent her advance on copies of her book or on chocolate; it was still income and she still owed taxes.)

Then there are the writers who don’t pay attention to the business leg of things because it “interferes with their creativity” or because they think that keeping tax records will somehow taint their artistic purity. Some of these writers are just confused about the length they need this particular leg of their stool to be – the business end of the business doesn’t have to take precedence over everything else unless that’s the way you choose to run things. A good many other writers who claim these reasons are, so far as I can see, just making excuses. Either they hate paperwork and think that “it will mess up my creativity” is an acceptable public excuse for skiving off that particular job, or they haven’t sold yet and they’re grumpy about it, so they use these to simultaneously imply that they are heroically protecting their creative genius by ignoring business stuff (and not selling) and that anyone who has sold (and who must perforce deal with business stuff) must be far less creative than they are. Which may be a help to their tender egos, but really doesn’t do much for their writing or potential writing careers.

There are plenty of professional, published, selling writers who hate paperwork, record-keeping, doing publicity, and all the other business-related aspects of having a writing career. A few have a helpful spouse or other family member who handles the business part for them (if I didn’t have that darned M.B.A., maybe I could convince one of my sisters to take it over for me…). Some hire a business manager the minute they get to a place where they can afford it. Most of us, though, have to bite the bullet and just do it ourselves. No job is 100% fun, 24/7.

What one can do, as I mentioned before, is to consider just how long this leg of the stool has to be, given what you want to do and where you hope to go in your writing career. There are a few things, like keeping tax records, that are really non-negotiable. A lot of administrative and publicity stuff, though, can be pared down to a bare minimum if one has a day job (or supportive spouse/partner) that pays the bills and/or one doesn’t really care how much money one’s writing makes (or how fast). If, on the other hand, one wants to milk every last possible dime out of each publication, one may prefer to devote more time and energy to non-writing stuff like giving seminars or speaking at libraries (which, by the way, frequently pay, sometimes quite well. I know at least three writers who make a very good mid-five-figure-or-more annual income from speaking engagements, in addition to what their writing brings in).

Which brings me to the writers who place too much emphasis on the business part of writing. Generally, these are beginners desperate to break in somehow, anyhow; some are nervous newly published professional who haven’t quite processed the fact yet. These are the folks who haunt bookstores, trying to analyze the market for “hot trends” that they then go home and try to write, regardless of whether their interests or talents lie in that direction (and ignoring the fact that what’s on bookstore shelves isn’t what editors are buying now. It’s what they bought two to five years ago.) These are the folks who neglect the Art and the Craft legs in favor of grabbing frantically at each and every professional opportunity that floats by, without stopping to consider whether it suits their interests or where it is likely to take their career. Five years later, they wake up and realize that they’re exhausted from ghostwriting three novels and working on two series for different “house names” every year, and writing is no fun any more.

There are, of course, writers who make similar choices with eyes wide open. Some of them make significant incomes, but you’ve never heard of them, because very little of their work is published under their own names…and they like it that way. They are not “doing it wrong.” They are not twisting what they want to write into something else in hopes of selling it. They are putting exactly as much emphasis on the money-and-business leg of their particular writing stool as they want and need to in order to do the kind of writing they want.

And that is the point of this little series of posts. There Is No One True Way. That writing stool always has three legs, but each writer gets to pick the length (importance, amount of time and energy spent) for each leg. As long as the career has the balance the particular writer wants, it’s fine. And unlike real furniture, the metaphorical stool is easily adaptable – if, at some point, one realizes that one is dissatisfied with the current balance, one has only to work a bit more on one leg and a bit less on another until one finds a new equilibrium.