Building Your Book as a Business
Being an entrepreneur, very little happens where you don’t think this could be a business. Well, in working toward creating a science fiction book, I figured I might as well structure this as a business as well.
I don’t know how other people do this, because I have not talked to many or know anyone that has created a business with the idea of writing books. I have been doing a deep dive and trying to understand how this is done though.
What I have learned is that there are a lot of ways to go about this. All of them seem intimidating…
Just like most things you tend to read about and look into, there seem to be opinions all over the map. Often contradicting each other. Clear as mud I guess, just like most of what I get into.
I enjoy the act of figuring things out. At least until I am overwhelmed with frustration that is.
So here is what I have landed on so far. The book should be a business, and who knows, maybe there will be more books coming along that also contribute to the business. Actually, that has been the idea all along really. It more or less comes down to how I structure this whole thing. Trying to overlay some business structure while also being creative and writing is a challenge. These two things feel like they don’t go together very well, but I believe they have to.
Here are the steps I have taken this week for this book/business venture.
Opened a checking account so I know how much I am sinking into this and have good accountability on this “business.”
Set up website hosting and an email account for this business
shamon@shamonwrites.com is the email account
ShamonWrites.com is the website and unofficial business name so far.
Started writing blogs that will eventually be released for this website to document the process.
Set up an email contact CRM tool to start an email newsletter to build an email list in order to keep people updated.
Been working on the sales copy for the back of the book and eventual sales pages.
I read somewhere that doing this before you wrote the book was best. I am not sure about that yet, and I have not finished the book yet, so who knows? I do have a basic idea of where the book is going to go and what it is about. So, it was fun to play with this a little bit and see how it felt along the way.
All this while doing my day job and also writing as often as I can.
At this point, I have written over twelve thousand words of the book. Who knows if any of them will see the light of day, but it feels so accomplished and so insignificant at the same time. How is that even possible?