3. Quality Control. This is where products and processes are tested for defects. For all writers, Quality Control obviously includes all of the editing and revision parts of the job; for the self-published, it includes packaging details as well – everything from design (page layout, font/typeface, cover design) to
Read more →2. Sales and marketing. Sales is defined as “the act of selling a product in return for money or other compensation.” Marketing is the strategy that the business uses to get to the sales part. Sales and marketing is generally considered the second of the two line
Read more →1. Operations – This includes primarily production, but also design, development, and fulfillment. The business of writing starts with Operations, the first, largest, and most important of the line function areas. It includes all of the aspects of production/manufacturing, but also such necessary elements as purchasing, order
Read more →I have never met a would-be writer who has a business plan. OK, I haven’t met many professional writers who have a formal business plan, either. Nevertheless, every last professional writer I know, of whatever genre, pays a great deal of attention to the business of writing,
Read more →People go into collaborations for different reasons…and each project, and each co-author, is a different situation. Sometimes, two or more writers collaborate because they came up with a brilliant idea in the bar at three in the morning…and next day, it still looks brilliant and fun. Sometimes,
Read more →There is an old saying that goes something like: “You can have it fast, you can have it cheap, you can have it good. Pick any two.” Meaning that if you want it fast and cheap, it won’t be good; if you want it fast and good,
Read more →For a certain kind of writer, the opening of a story is easy and fun – you get to allude to mysterious events and drop ominous clues. And then comes the middle, where all the stuff you’ve been alluding to has to start showing up and actually
Read more →The whole point of a good prologue is to do something that the writer cannot do in the main part of the story without violating some important aspect of storytelling, like chronology or viewpoint or continuity. For instance, if the main story is told entirely from the
Read more →Prologues are out of favor these days, one of the “forbidden” (by whom?) writing techniques, yet people keep asking about them because they know intuitively that the technique has enormous possibilities. Quite a few folks go ahead and use them anyway. Sometimes this works brilliantly; other times,
Read more →Flashbacks are one of those indispensable writers’ tools that tend to alternately get encouraged and discouraged, depending on whether or not they’ve been overused and abused recently or not. They’re a way of slipping the reader back into the past of the story, so that a particularly
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