Dear Writers: What’s Your Business Model?
Eleven years ago, I kicked off a small indie publishing company to put out RPG products written using the d20 system. To my surprise, I wasn’t awful at it, and between 2005 and 2007 I worked pretty continuously at producing stuff that would earn me money instead of finishing my PhD. Don’t get me wrong, I made plenty of mistakes in those two years– the worst being an utter failure to adequately back up my creative work and business files, which is one of the three things that finally killed me off – but I had a metric for success when I set out and I hit it, pretty religiously. It also taught me two important things, when it came to writing. The first was the realisation that I was running a small business, rather than just being a writer. This was obvious enough, right from the beginning, that I actually looked at some small business advice and bought a