…And Eight Mindset Shifts That Happen When You Do
At some point in your career, you will realize the importance of treating your writing as a business.
If you are a creative who has been taught that art and money are diametrically opposed, this can be a foreign — even abhorrent — notion.
You might worry that caring about the financial aspects of your work is a betrayal of the craft, or that “writing to market” is tantamount to selling out.
Yet when I observe the careers of successful authors, it becomes clear that this view is incorrect. Treating writing as a business doesn’t have to hinder your creativity. In fact, it can bolster your creativity in several helpful ways:
1. You begin focusing on quantity… as a path to quality
Writers tend to be perfectionists.
As creatives, our natural impulse is to labor at a project until it’s perfect.
Yet successful authors adopt a seemingly counter-intuitive approach. Instead of getting stuck on a single project, they focus on churning out lots of work, recognizing that real perfection comes through repetition.
In the book Art and Fear, the authors tell a story about a ceramics teacher who divided his class into two halves. One group would be graded on the quality of their work, while the other would be graded on quantity — their raw output.
When grading time came around, the results were telling:
“The works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group were busy churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat around theorizing about perfection…”
Most writers don’t start out naturally talented.
Read an early John Grisham or Stephen King book, and you will notice distinctive weaknesses in their writing. What changed was that they kept on writing, and they wrote fast. With each new book, they refined their processes, smoothed over their weaknesses and highlighted their strengths, just like the students in the ceramics class.
If you believe in pursuing pure art, then you’ll spend days or months laboring to get a sentence just right.
But if you see writing as a business, you will be focused on the quantity of your work, trusting that good writing comes through repetition.
2. Your writing projects become shorter
In order to write a lot, you also have to start writing short.
Instead of spending a year laboring away at a 200,000-word epic novel, you will be more inclined to churn out a short story every week, or perhaps a smaller novel every 2–3 months.
There’s something uniquely educational about bringing a story to completion.
Every time you write the end on your manuscript, it feels like leveling up as an author. As with the students from the ceramics class, you’ve finished another iteration of your craft, learned from your mistakes, and gotten better as a result.
But if finishing a project is the best way to improve your craft, then it behooves you to write shorter, rather than longer, pieces.
I once heard of a financially successful erotic-fiction writer who could churn out 100 stories per year. She was able to do this because her stories were always under 10,000 words. Not only did she make a good deal of money — $10,000 per month — she also got really good at telling that style of story by repeating it in short spurts.
This is, of course, an extreme example. But remember: form follows function. If you treat writing as a business, that means producing lots of quality content fast. And the best way to do this is by writing short.
3. You stop caring about appearances
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” says the old adage.
Yet even writers sometimes fail to see past surface-level appearances.
Take publishing for example. So many authors aspire to be traditionally published. The extent of their aspiration is to get picked up by a reputable agent, who then sells their work to a prestigious publishing house.
Certainly, these writers assume, if I just write that single break-out bestseller, then my writing career will be set for life.
The reality is much bleaker.
Most books, even good ones, never get picked up by an agent for various reasons. Even if they do, there’s no guarantee that the agent will be able to place that book with a publisher. In the unlikely possibility that they succeed, the advances for first-time authors are woefully small, not nearly enough to justify the amount of effort the writer put into their work, much less be financially sustainable.
And yet, millions of writers vie to be traditionally published, because it’s a shiny target.
Now let’s contrast this with self-publishing.
Books that are self-published have a bad reputation. Those who don’t know the industry tend to see self-publishing as the dumping ground for work that no respectable publisher will take. Self-published authors are either regarded as mediocre hacks who don’t know how to edit or sleazy marketers who use dark magic to finagle with Amazon algorithms.
What many writers don’t realize is that lots of self-published books are just as good as their traditional publishing counterparts. When done right, these writers can even make six-figures in a year, much more than some traditionally published books will ever make in a lifetime. Even successful authors such as Brandon Sanderson have at times chosen to self-publish their work.
Still, many writers will automatically disregard self-publishing because of the industry’s reputation.
This is what I mean when I talk about appearances versus realities. Just because something looks promising, doesn’t necessarily mean that the facts back it up. Likewise, there are many literary opportunities out there that you may be tempted to disregard at first. But a deeper look can reveal that this choice is based on unfounded prejudices.
When you treat your writing as a business, appearances being to fade away as you start focusing on hard realities. After all, prestige doesn’t pay the bills, money does.
4. You regain a sense of control
The reality of being a business owner is that you have to do everything yourself. There’s no way to pass the buck. If you don’t do it, it won’t get done.
But it also means that you have an unrivaled sense of control over your work.
Most writers I’ve met have no desire to run their own business.
They’re specialists. They just want to write!
As a result, they put off all the other pesky tasks such as marketing, networking, and social media. Or else, they assume that the publisher will take care of it for them.
The downside is that they have very little agency over what happens to their writing careers. Once their manuscript is with an agent or a publisher, it’s completely out of their hands. As conversations are taking place — or not taking place — behind closed doors, these authors are helpless to do anything except twiddle their thumbs and pray for favor from the literary gods.
What this creates is an atmosphere of uncertainty, fear, and ultimately powerlessness.
No one wants to feel powerless. No one wants to be beholden to forces outside of their control. And treating your writing like a business can change that.
It can give you back your sense of agency.
While other writers are agonizing over query letters and agent responses, you will be busy building and refining your audience. While other authors are biting their nails, wondering if their books will earn-out — and whether their careers will tank they don’t — you can be actively marketing your work and strategizing how to break in with new audiences.
While others are busy waiting, you will be able to hustle.
5. You start to diversify your work
In my last piece on the business of writing, I talked about how you should treat your writing like an investment portfolio.
Instead of concentrating on a single masterpiece, you want to diversify out into multiple projects, with varying levels of commitment and return. For example, if you are a novel writer, you can also be working on short stories or flash fiction on the side. You could run a blog, write articles for Medium, or even learn to write copy for pay.
The idea is to be working on multiple types of projects, so that if one falls through, you have other work to lean on.
Every project should serve a different purpose. Some are strictly for paying the bills. Some are pure passion projects. Most will fall somewhere in between. But when put together, they will form your unique creative portfolio, one that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
For the longest time, I resisted diversifying my writing.
I saw myself as a novel writer, and that was it. I worried that working on other projects would take time away from my grand masterpiece. But then I shifted my perspective from thinking about individual writing projects towards thinking about my overall writing career.
This was the best decision I could have made.
I don’t know if my novel will be successful. There are too many factors to consider, including many that are out of my control. But what I can do is release lots of different work, and see which ones will stick.
Remember, its never about a single writing project. Rather, it’s about having a greater writing career that will last for the rest of your life.
6. You begin to actually enjoy marketing
Marketing doesn’t have to be icky.
It can come off as icky, especially if someone tries to sell you something that you don’t want or need.
But at its best, marketing is about offering something to other people that you believe will truly benefit their lives.
As writers, we don’t deal with tangible products, but rather with ideas and worldviews. When you market your writing, you are selling people on a unique perspective, a way of seeing the world differently. If you believe you have something important to say, then naturally you’ll be motivated to share those ideas with other people.
Treating your writing as a business means thinking strategically about who will resonate best with your writing, finding out where those people hang out, and meeting them where they’re at.
The best feeling that can come from marketing is realizing that you’ve built a community of people who are passionate about the work that you’ve created.
As Russell Nohelty explains in How to Be A Successful Author,
“When you’re marketing, advertising, or posting on social media, you are trying to make a connection to humans who enjoy the way you see the world.”
Admittedly, there is a steep learning curve that comes with marketing, but if you get it right, that means more people who learn about your work. And more people will benefit from your view of the world.
7. You stop seeing money as a dirty word
Some time ago, the notion arose that real artists should starve for their work.
This idea became so popular that being an impoverished artist became seen as a badge of honor. Many famous twentieth-century authors such as Ernest Hemingway even exaggerated their poverty as a way of improving their credibility.
In hindsight, the starving artist trope can clearly be seen as a privileged and elitist view, one that discounted the true poverty of millions around the world.
Yet even today, a form of the artists should starve mindset exists in society.
Today, many writers are afraid that if they worry too much about the money, then it will drain away their passion for the craft. They’re afraid of selling out. But it doesn’t have to be an either/or. Instead of undermining our creativity, money can actually bolster it.
Money can be a good measure. If people are buying your work, then that’s a sign that the ideas you’ve championed actually matter, and that you’re not just writing about frivolous curiosities.
On the other hand, if you’re not making money from your work, that’s a sign that you haven’t gotten the word out properly. That there is an audience out there for your writing, but you just haven’t met them yet.
In other words, money can be an indicator that we need to do things differently, that we might need to change our strategies.
Ultimately, the reason writers write is because they want to tell compelling stories. The money is just a way of keeping ourselves honest and accountable.
As Stephen Pressfield explains,
“the pro takes money to turn his love into a job. Technically, he plays for pay, but in the end, he does it for the love of the game.”
8. You become comfortable with trial and error
Running a business is all about taking risks, then evaluating the results.
What works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for others, and business owners are constantly experimenting, always trying to learn from others.
At the outset of your writing career, you want to be trying lots of different things. It can be tempting to settle into a rhythm of just doing what’s comfortable. But don’t do that! You want to experiment with different styles, genres, topics, and themes.
Of course, when you find a system that works for you, stick with it. But always be revisiting the process, seeing if there are ways to make it better and more efficient.
Remember, the world is always changing, and as a writer, you must be ready to adapt.
James L. Yu is a Taiwanese-American author who loves writing about history, religion, and social change. Originally from Houston, TX, he moved to Los Angeles after college to complete a stint of inner-city missionary work. Along the way, he helped start a socially-conscious grocery store/cafe, got licensed as a registered investment advisor (Series 7 & 66), and eventually left the financial sector to pursue writing full-time. He is currently working on The Soaring Tigers, an Asian epic-fantasy series inspired by republican-era China. You can follow him on Twitter at @jamesyuwrites or sign up for his monthly newsletter.
