BUSINESSING THE CRAFT OUT OF
WRITING
As I mentioned in yesterday, there are a lot of people out there that want to take your money and
“help” you print your books. Book doctors who’ll re-write your work for you,
Cover Designers who’ll come up with that perfect cover, and even formatters who’ll
ensure your work is ready for upload to whatever online service you choose to
self-publish on.
But worse among them all are the business people. These folks claim that
writing is a business and that you
can’t succeed if you don’t treat it like one. They offer seminars (for a fee)
or even consultations (for a fee). They extoll spreadsheets, virtual assistants,
and acting professionally. Some of them are even authors.
Again, I have to call bullshit. Writing is a craft. We aren’t
stamping out books from a mold, we’re spinning stories for readers. It’s art as
much as painting or music. When you think of it as business, you’re taking the
art away. The same thing has happened on television, which now features teams
of writers on most shows, all methodically and systematically churning out
formulaic scripts.
Whether you are saving the cat,
or Denting some pulp, please don’t ever lose sight of the most important thing
about self-publishing: telling a good story. Study the craft, not the
marketing. Once you can master self-publishing, then you can move on to selling
more copies, and then once you do that, you can worry about keeping track of
expenses, maximizing your profits and all that other non-artistic crap.
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