Business 101: The Every Day Novelist, #1
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About this ebook
Writer's face a world of infinite possibility--and hard decisions. To navigate the publishing world, you must understand business and money from the point of view as a businessperson, not an employee.
Now, J. Daniel Sawyer, longtime businessman, educator, and author of over twenty books guides you through the transition from thinking like an employee to thinking like an author-entrepeneur, and gives you the tools you need to make informed decisions about how to grow your fiction writing from a hobby to a life-sustaining career.
J. Daniel Sawyer
WHILE STAR WARS and STAR TREK seeded J. Daniel Sawyer's passion for the unknown, his childhood in academia gave him a deep love of history and an obsession with how the future emerges from the past. This obsession led him through adventures in the film industry, the music industry, venture capital firms in the startup culture of Silicon Valley, and a career creating novels and audiobooks exploring the worlds that assemble themselves in his head. His travels with bohemians, burners, historians, theologians, and inventors led him eventually to a rural exile where he uses the quiet to write, walk on the beach, and manage a pair of production companies that bring innovative stories to the ears of audiences across the world. For stories, contact info, podcasts, and more, visit his home page at http://www.jdsawyer.net
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Business 101 - J. Daniel Sawyer
Business 101
The Every Day Novelist
by J. Daniel Sawyer
AWP Nonfiction
A division of ArtisticWhispers Productions, Inc.
© 2016 J. Daniel Sawyer
All Rights Reserved
Book Design by ArtisticWhispers
Diagrams and Illustrations © 2016 Kitty NicIaian
This book is a work of nonfiction. Views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the positions of AWP, its sister companies, or its business partners.
This file is licensed for private individual entertainment and education only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of AWP.
Dedication
For Michael and Ben, who provoked it
With special thanks to ML Buchman
Who helped make it what it is
Business 101
The Every Day Novelist
J. Daniel Sawyer
Table of Contents
Introduction: Business and Art
Chapter 1: The Employee Game vs. The Business Game
Employee Thinking
Heirarchy
Task Lists
Effort
Money
The Games We Play
Traditional Publishing and Employee Thinking
The Basics of Business Thinking
Relationships
Systems
Outcome
Assets
The Other Two Big Differences
Success and the Long Term
Writing as a Career
Chapter 2: Different Kinds of Businesses
Transaction-Based Businesses
Asset-Based Businesses
Widget-Powered Businesses
Taste-Powered Businesses
Sampling
Price-Consciousness
Taste is King
The Value of This Exercise
Chapter 3: Knowing Which Business You're In
The Great Fast-Food Riddle
Like MacDonald's, Your Business Is Not What It Appears
Copyright: The Ridiculous Truth
Chapter 4: Endless Horizon
What It Means To Build A Career
Educating Yourself
Final Thoughts
Acknowledgements
Also By J. Daniel Sawyer
About The Author
End Notes
Introduction
Business And Art
Part of the dream for most fiction writers—and certainly most fiction writers who pick up a book like this—is to get their work to market. To get published. To have readers pick up their book off a shelf (in a library, or a bookstore, or an online store) and read it, and enjoy it, and talk about it.
And, eventually, to be able to have an audience that follows us from book to book. Maybe even one that will pay us to keep writing—maybe pay enough that we can write as our main career (if we want to).
Once upon a time, getting published
looked, from the outside, like it was the difficult part of the process—mysterious from the outside, filled with strange rituals and procedures (queries, partials, galleys, etc.) that one must engage in to please the gatekeepers (the editors who must like your work in order for you to have a hope of selling it). You had to get good enough to get their attention, and then you were into the secret world behind the veil.
Of course, as is the case with any game with its own rules, these procedures weren't as opaque and strange from the inside as they were from the outside. But getting published
was still a long, complicated process, large swaths of which were outside of the author's control.
The world doesn't work that way anymore. Oh, you can still do things that way, but if your goal is to get published,
then taking it through that old-world process is doing things the hard way. Getting published now is as easy as uploading an ebook to KDP or Kobo. Of course, once you do that, you're not just a writer anymore, you're also a publisher.
Whether you go the old route or the new route, a long-term, sustainable career depends on both your business savvy and your writing chops. Later books in this series will deal with different elements of storytelling. This (as you may