The Back End

One of the things I keep coming back to is the fact that writing, especially writing for a living, is a business. It doesn’t have to be—for instance, people who write fanfiction for free don’t have to worry about that part. But anyone who gets paid for their writing is running a business.

This can cause problems, because a lot of people who want to write don’t actually know anything about running the back end of a business. (Some don’t know how to run the front end, either, but that’s another matter.)

“The back end” is the part of the business that’s also called “support” or “staff functions,” depending on what kind of business one is running. Strictly speaking, it can include everything that doesn’t directly involve producing books and selling them to customers—all of the tracking, financial management, publicity, and other administrative functions.

Nobody starts off being good at all these things; one has to learn. A big part of learning is figuring out how and when to switch one’s focus from one aspect to another, so that nothing is neglected. (Or at least, that as little as possible falls through the cracks.)

Unfortunately, there aren’t many resources for finding out about the back end of the business. Except for doing publicity, it isn’t visible to the outside observer. The overwhelming majority of “how to start a successful small business” information on the internet focus on scaling up production, reaching and keeping customers, and developing a team to handle things like shipping products. Very little of that is going to be useful for someone trying to make a living as a freelance writer. The fastest writer I ever knew could produce a novel in two weeks (and then had to take a month-long break), and nobody needs a “fulfillment person” to mail a box to an editor every six weeks. Even a self-published writer selling books out of their basement is likely to take a long time before they’re generating enough sales volume to justify hiring help.

The result is that writers often shrug and decide not to bother (since most of what they see doesn’t apply to them anyway). They choose to neglect the back end of their business in favor of either a) the fun parts (whatever those are for a particular writer), b) the things that “everyone knows” have to be done, which is mainly production, sales, and publicity. And yes, those things have to be done, but by themselves, they aren’t enough.

I know quite a few writers who are natural publicists. They have an instinct for how to reach their audience; they’re good at coming up with interesting contests or events that will generate the most bang for their bucks; and they have both the energy and the inclination that allows them to do all of it and still write regularly. But even some of these people have run into trouble because they forgot to consider the financial implications of what they were doing. Spending half the advance on a huge book-themed launch party is thrilling and exciting, but it is extremely unlikely to result in enough new sales to break even (especially if most of the attendees are the writer’s friends and relatives, who would buy the book anyway). From a business perspective, it’s not worth it.

And that little phrase is the key: from a business perspective. Far too many writers want to be “successful,” but don’t want to think about managing their business as a business. I’ve met several who seemed to feel that it was sacrilegious to suggest that their writing should be viewed as anything other than a creative art.

“Working from a business perspective” doesn’t mean selling out. It is perfectly possible to write whatever one’s muse hands one, with no concern for sales, income, or other practical business considerations, and then after it is written decide what to do with it that will best serve one’s business purposes. “What to do with it” does not mean “whether to add a bunch of action/sex/political scenes so it will sell;” it means taking a cold, hard look at what one has written and thinking about who will buy it, how best to let those people know that such a book exists, and how much time and energy is worth putting into promoting and selling this book before starting on the next one. It means balancing decisions between what one wants for this book in this market and what one hopes for one’s writing career over the next five, twenty, or forty years.

What is worth the cost, even from a business perspective, will vary depending on the writer, where they are in their career, and where they intend for their writing to go. Someone who just wants to prove they can write at a professionally published level won’t make the same decisions as an early mid-list writer who hopes to build a long writing career. A writer who loathes appearances and publicity may decide to double-down on writing more and better books, or choose to spend their entire advance on paying a publicist to handle the work they hate. An extrovert may decide that it’s worth spending more time on appearances because of the energy and inspiration they get from doing them.

Ultimately, deciding where one wants to go (and how badly one wants it) determines what is worth the cost of getting there. And both of those decisions are back-end decisions.