Imagine producing all of your income from writing fiction.

NOW, let me show you the way!

Welcome to an in-depth guide to what it takes to earn a full time living from your writing.

What you're about to learn;

• Why more writers are able to earn a full time living.
• How do you separate yourself from the pack and become one of those authors.
• Why Treating Your Writing Like a Business  makes the difference?

This guide will explain what is behind a successful publishing business and how treating your writing like a business creates significant competitive advantage.

This is a portion of the material I've compiled through research and my work with six and seven figure authors.

Table of Contents

I would like to help you understand the changes over time and the pros and cons of traditional and independent publishing. 

To do this, we need to get into the Wayback Machine and revisit the 1990s…

It’s 1993, and you're running Windows NT on a new Pentium processor and doing Altavista web searches on your new broadband connection. You find a news story that Barnes and Noble have gone public. 

Back then when a Barnes and Noble opened near you, it was awesome.

If you were like me, you met friends there and browse the stacks, building up a pile of books to thumb through while you drank coffee in the cafe.

Barnes and Noble overgrew the market, and as quick as their big-box book stores were popping up, so were the disputes and stories of the end of an era.

Articles announced the death of the independent book store.

That B&N would do what Blockbuster did to the local video store. These stories were driven mainly by big publishers that were in disputes with the retailer because of its demands around placement fees. 

Let me introduce a significant point, one that we will revisit and is critical for any author to understand.

All revenue is derived from the reader.

The entire publishing industry is predicated on the revenues that can come from readers.

After the point of sale, it's just a matter of who gets what cut.

Back to the Story...

At this point, nothing has changed for authors. Your path to making a living from your writing was the same. You needed to get a publishing deal. That meant submitting your work to agents in a hope to land an agent.

A determined writer wrote a lot of words. The actual product and then submission letters.

Acceptance by an agent did not secure a book deal. The agent had to convince an acquisition editor that the manuscript fit the editor's publishing portfolio. 

Any publisher that operates as a for-profit business, looks to deliver a return to investors.

The publisher's only obligation is to find and publish books that sell. Not find the most artistic or diverse work. They want to identify all the books they can publish profitably.

One limitation of the business is how many books they can review and edit.

The gatekeepers (a somewhat dirty term) were people reviewing and making decisions as to what they thought would sell.

Added pressure was on the acquisition team because the publishing companies were also consolidating through the process of leveraged buyouts. This meant that a portion of their profits would need to go to debt service in the future. 

Banks, mezzanine debt and private equity funds were now at the table looking for a portion of the reader revenue pie.

So here is where we are are in the story so far:

1. The number of retail locations are shrinking.
2. Publishers are fighting with retailers over how much of the pie each should get.
3. Authors have to find agents then the agents need to convince editors to buy a book.

Around the same time...

Now imagine you’re a wealthy individual looking to invest in technology companies. 

You agree to take a meeting with a man looking to raise one million dollars for twenty percent of his startup. 

Back then, this guy couldn’t go on Shark Tank to raise the money. He had to call on friends and family.

Here is the pitch…

“My company will sell books online. We will sell them at a discount because we will not have any retail locations. We will operate as a warehouse. We will use this new search technology like Altavista (the google guys are still in school) to help customers find the book they want.

You see, there are three million books in print, but the average big-box book store only carries 175,000 titles. We will have a competitive advantage because we will have a lower cost structure and a more comprehensive selection. We don’t have to stock every book everywhere. We will have only a few locations and ship media mail or drop ship from the publisher.”

You look him up and down. He is passionate and driven, maybe a bit crazy.

You think to yourself, Why would anyone buy online, and how the hell does this guy think he has a chance against a well-capitalized competitor like Barnes and Noble? 

“No, thank you,” you answer.

The following year Jeff Bezos formed the company that would be known as Amazon.

In October of 2004, Wired published Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Article. The article points out that at the time, more than half of Amazon’s book sales came from outside the top 130,000 titles. Validation of the Amazon Bookstore model.

Amazon Website Circa 1998

Traditional

• They share costs.
• They share in the profits.
• They can access markets that may not be as big as the Amazon space, but when added together are significant.
• You need to be selected by the publisher as a worthwhile investment.
• If you’re an author that doesn’t want to do all the publishing work, then having a publisher makes sense.
• Smaller imprints may have genre expertise that others don’t.

Don’t forget there is an icky group of vanity publishers that still exist. If anyone requires you to buy copies of your book or pay them - Run!

Indie Published

If you think your product merits a place in the market, then prove it. The costs of getting into the market are negligible.

• You have to do all the work.
• You bear all the financial risk.
• You reap all the financial rewards.
• You improve your chance of getting offered a publishing deal and a better deal as you have proved yourself in the market.