Last Monday, I talked about the need for writers to develop a business model. It’s not the first time I’ve said this and I doubt it will be the last, but it was the first time I’ve said this here on the blog and in such am easily sharable form. That meant people started giving me feedback, which largely came in two camps: How, exactly, do I do this business model thing? GIVE US DETAILS; or Dude, I’ve got a business model, but it’s not working the way I want. I’ll address both of those eventually, but given that I’m Melbourne today (and I’ve gone three days without medication and CPAP, thanks to poor packing on my part) I’m going to hold off on answering the first. Mostly because I started and it got very, very long. As for the second: well, I’ve worked for a bunch of small businesses where exactly this has happened. This is the nature of running a small business, particularly one where you’re dealing primarily with other businesses who act as middle men, as most traditionally published authors do. Many of those small businesses I worked for had plans, but their plans were…flawed. Based on wild

I’ve been reading ReWork and It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work over the weekend, processing the business advice of the 37 Signals/Basecamp founders who have rejected the notion of building a growth-at-all-costs business. The former is very philosophy focused, while the latter is a ore process-oriented approach which implements that philosophy. One of the ideas that intrigued me in It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy At Work is the discussion of heartbeats–a way of overcoming communication challenges in a decentralised workspace without devolving into meetings and reports. There’s a more detailed discussion of it over on their blog (and another discussion here), but at it’s core its a system of automated check-ins where folks list what they’ve worked on with their day, coupled with a system for discussion and requests for updates. It’s a really intriguing idea, but not terribly useful in a company of one (which, essentially, most writers are regardless of whether they self-publish or not). With that in mind, I did what I often do when encountering group-based management systems that seem like useful ideas: I figured out a way to deploy it online. The last time I did this it launched the Sunday Circle,

My website seems to have spontaneously created this particular post, throwing up the headline with no particular content to share, and broadcasting it to the usual channels. I originally came in to delete the post and take it down, then figured, what the hell? It’s actually a pretty good metaphor for today: I’ve just finished ten days straight of grading assignments, making comments on first chapters for forty-two different novels, and my brain is feeling rather scraped out and devoid of things worth saying. The thing about marking creative work, as opposed to essays, is that it gets horribly repetitive. You don’t have time to explain everything that’s going wrong across three or four thousand words, which means you focus in on the stuff that will help the manuscript get to the next level. Inevitably, when dealing with new writers, this comes down to the same conversations about scene structure and developing beats and figuring out what your characters want, talking about the mechanics of good description and thinking about patterns of action and reaction when you start generating dialogue. And the really hard part is trying to ensure your not treating every problem in a manuscript like it’s a

When talking about the writing business with folks, one of my recurring refrains is that we don’t really sell stories to people–we sell a token of identity. It may be an aspirational identity, or one that the reader already identifies with, but even the use of the word reader in this context underlies my point. Over the weekend I was catching up on my blog reading and was intrigued by Fast Company’s article about the way our sewerage holds markers that can be used to identify our income. It caught me off-guard with its reminders that consumption is an act of cultural identity, but the researchers noted that: Surprisingly, (higher) income correlated with more alcohol and coffee consumption. Regarding coffee, researchers point to the intelligentsia institution that coffee has become, in which this choice of beverage is actually a statement about one’s self. You could easily say the same thing about wine, whiskey, or craft beer, too—all of which are tasty, and culturally prized delivery systems for a chemically identical ethanol buzz. Types of writing are just as cultural coded as the types of coffee we drink and the booze we consume. Certain types of fiction are culturally prized because