GenrePunk Ninja

I won’t lie: I’m nervous about the infrastructure changes I mentioned in my last newsletter.

The website migration is in full swing now. Brain Jar Press has moved to its new server, where things run faster and smoother than they did in the past.

My website has technically moved, but I’m still sending people to the old site while I redesign the front end and move the GenrePunk books and mugs over to BrainJarPress.com.

Intellectually, I know this is the right call. Emotionally…eek! (And since you’re reading this on Patreon or my website, this is the point to add ‘I was partially right!’ The transfer of the GenrePunk Ninja newsletter has not gone smoothly, which is why my Patreon re-launched and now syndicate’s these posts out to PeterMBall.com)

Change is hard, even when you know it’s the right thing. That subtle voice in the back of my head keeps whispering, “But what if this ruins everything?”

And the answer is hard: everything was already ruined. Sticking with my current set-up was going to lose me money I couldn’t afford to lose just yet.

I simply hadn’t noticed because the writing business is, at best, asynchronous.

THE SYNCHRONOUS WORK MODEL

I wanted to be a writer from a young age, which meant I got the “there’s no money in writing” speech from many people by the time I started submitting work.

Between concerned family members, guidance counselors, and random strangers on a bus, I internalized the idea that writing didn’t make money very early on.

Thirty-one years later, I’m still relatively light on “real job” experience and have made a significant chunk of my lifetime income on the back of writing and writing-related gigs.

So there’s a misunderstanding there, and as someone who now mentors new writers pretty regularly, I spend a lot of time thinking about how misunderstanding emerges.

I believe one big aspect is the way we frame work, culturally, as a relatively synchronous exchange of time for money. If I clock into an office job from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM every weekday, I will be paid a weekly wage for my time.

Time is the important element here, because I’ll be paid the same whether I’m on top of my game and killing it or feeling sluggish and half-arsing my way through the day’s tasks.

Gradually, over the course of our working life, our time gets more valuable, but the exchange of time for money is still there.

It’s a rare employer who hires you full time, pays you a huge chunk of money every year, and says, “Set your own hours. I care only about the results.”

“Work” in most people’s heads is all about the hours.

And if you think in terms of hours, writing will do your head in.

THE PROBLEM WITH WRITING

Here’s the bitter truth: writing doesn’t care about how many hours you put in. I recently tracked my time and realised that a rough draft of a short 40,000-word novel took me just shy of 22 hours.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume revisions and editing will take another 22 hours. 44 hours of work in total. Nobody is paying me an hourly wage for any of that.

Nobody, in fact, will pay me anything for the book until it’s fully revised and out into the world, and even then I’ll need to sell 586 copies to earn the equivalent of a “modest” wage for the time I put in.

The first 260 sales might get me over making the minimum hourly wage here in Australia

And that’s assuming I don’t have to invest any additional time in marketing or selling the book.

Since nobody is paying me by the hour—and selling 600 copies without marketing isn’t easy at this phase of my career—writing seems like a pretty terrible job.

Because it is.

But we shouldn’t think of it as a job. Writing is really about asset creation.

ASSET-BASED THINKING

The trick of writing is disconnecting from the idea that work and income are synchronous, because writing isn’t work: it’s owning a small business.

A small business where you create assets you can continue to leverage for years—even decades—after they’re initially produced.

Assets that will appreciate and depreciate over the course of your career.

I released The Birdcage Heart & Other Strange Tales back in 2017, and it still sells copies eight years after.

I sold Exile to Apocalypse Ink Press in 2013, based on a short story series I’d written in 2011. It earned money in both iterations before the current version came into existence, and continues to sell to this day.

I released my first RPG book, House of the Transformed Toad, back in 2005. It still makes money as well. Not a lot of money, admittedly, but as I’ve talked about before, it shouldn’t make any given the odds stacked against it.

This is the transition in thinking that writing demands: income earned from assets is frequently asynchronous. It comes long after the initial work is done, and it can continue to earn money for a really long time.

The trick is building enough assets and making sure they’re valuable enough to add up to a viable business.

There are lots of ways to do this. Each new book makes your other books more valuable. Figuring out what to read next is hard — just ask any book nerd with an overloaded TBR shelf who still buys new books — so finding an author you love with a deep backlist is an incredibly valuable thing.

Winning awards and getting excellent reviews increase the cultural value of your work. So does building up a reading community or fan group, since reading is frequently a social activity and past a certain level of competence the “big success” of a book is community driven (I talk about this a lot in the Short Fiction Lab #1 essay on success).

But a lot of this is also out of your control. The publishing industry is full of massive successes that were, for lack of a better term, the result of things coming together in the right way at the right time.

Take L. J. Smith’s The Vampire Diaries, for example. The first novel came out in 1991 with moderate success. In 2009 it became a hot property because conditions had primed the entertainment world to look for vampire-oriented teen romance stories, courtesy of the breakout success of Twilight.

Suddenly the books are selling again—and being expanded beyond the original trilogy—and The Vampire Diaries is about to become a TV series that runs for 8 seasons and has a bunch of spin-offs.

Is the book a better book than it was in 1991? No, but the story as an asset is infinitely more valuable than it was back then. Certainly popular enough to turn a finished trilogy into an ongoing series.

Which is where the added wrinkle of making money from writing — and particularly fiction writing — comes in.

You invest time in creating assets.

Those assets will not be paid out in a synchronous, predictable manner.

And the long-term value of those assets is often hard to gauge at the start of your career, because you don’t know when (or if) certain assets will take off. Nobody involved in publishing the novel in 1991 knew there would be a major hunger for vampire stories in 2009.

So you start your career flying blind, hoping everything pays off down the line.

Even as you build up those assets and they provide a relatively predictable amount of income, they don’t provide it consistently. There will be good months and bad months.

There are stretches where hard-boiled urban fantasy is hot, and your assets related to it sell like hotcakes, then stretches where it’s dead. Sometimes you sell a bunch of reprints to short stories; other times, you can’t sell a story to save your life.

One reason writers—and, particularly, Indies who rely on backlist sales—advocate for having a deep backlist is its ability to insulate you against the fluctuations of the market.

The more diverse your assets are, the more opportunities you have to leverage your assets and take advantage of the ebbs and flows.

ASSETS AND INFRASTRUCTURE

Why am I talking so much about assets when I started this newsletter talking about infrastructure?

Many of the infrastructure elements I’m re-arranging this week — newsletter set-ups, websites with stores attached, design and social media tools — are used to make book-based assets more valuable.

The challenge is that the costs associated with those tools typically accrue synchronously. A website costs $X amount of money to run each year. A newsletter system costs $Y amount of money each month.

In other words, your asynchronous income is unpredictable and chaotic, but your outgoings will be regular as clockwork.

Many writers don’t notice this because they have other, synchronous income streams underwriting their creative work. A regular paycheck from a day job, for example.

If the writing is underperforming for a month when a newsletter bill comes due, they can cover expenses from the synchronous income stream instead of the writing. So long as the money works out over a twelve-month period, everything works out.

But So Long is the challenge.

If you don’t have a synchronous income stream that will cover those expenses, you need to plan ahead. You need to look at the boom months, where every asset sells big, as a way of building up a war chest that keeps your infrastructure running, and stock money away to keep your bills paid during the months when things are slow.

That doesn’t come naturally to anyone who has spent the bulk of their life in a synchronous work-to-income environment. It’s why people look at writing and quail in fear at the possibility of making money.

It’s sure as heck why writers get themselves in trouble when they first transition to full-time writing.

And the thing is, I know all this. I’ve been writing for thirty-odd years now, and most of that time I’ve split my time between short-term or part-time gigs with relatively synchronous payment systems and asynchronous asset generation in the form of books and stories.

I still get caught out. In particular, last year, I got lazy. I had a few steady synchronous freelance gigs that paid me like clockwork. I could predict how much money was going into my account, and knew I could cover tools like websites and newsletter fees without planning for them.

On the plus side, this allowed me to take some big swings to add more value to assets.

Some of those worked out. More of them did not.

The problem is, it also allowed me to take my eye off the ball. I didn’t have to plan for anything because I knew I had any shortfall covered. Which means when one of those synchronous payment gigs wrapped up in late April, I wasn’t adequately prepared.

I went from being 70% synchronous work/30% leveraging asynchronous assets to 25% synchronous gigs to 75% leveraging asynchronous assets.

Suddenly, all the slow months at the start of the financial year hurt, because my asset sales did not cover the cost of the systems that supported my assets.

Another round of slow months would hurt me far worse, because I no longer had the synchronous income to cover the costs.

I might have had four months of sales where Brain Jar Press and GenrePunk Books were doing the best they’ve ever done, but that wasn’t enough to cover the losses from the eight months prior to that.

If the next twelve months followed the pattern of the last twelve months, my business was in deep shit.

Thing is, I’ve been here before. And I know exactly what to do.

THIS BOOK SAVED MY BUSINESS ONCE

I recommended Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First​ last week because I re-read it just prior to making all my big changes to websites and newsletter systems.

I first picked it up in 2020, when Brian Jar Press boomed unexpectedly, and working through it allowed me to run at a profit for the first time since launching in 2017.

I stayed running at a profit until 2024, when I’d taken my eye off the ball to focus on other things.

So now I’m going through the system again. I re-read Profit First and let it serve as my guide about what worked and what doesn’t. Using the advice to assess my business expenses, rebuild my account system, and prepare for a period where I have to focus on asynchronous profit generation.

I let Michalowicz’s system guide decisions about what stayed and what went, what I could afford to do, and how I’d run the next twelve months.

A lot of my infrastructure choices make things cheaper, and leverage assets better. Will my personal website be less fancy? Absolutely. But it also forces me to strip the website back to the three core things I want and need it to do.

Will the Brian Jar Press site be different from what it was? Indeed! But I found an absolute deal on website hosting and cut my website costs by 60% every year for the next three years. Plus, the site will run faster, with some other perks mixed in.

I’m pretty sure everything will be better than it was, but here is the absolute curse of asynchronous profit generation via assets.

It’s a risk.

It’s always a risk.

And human being are risk averse. We’re genetically wired to preserve what we have. We would rather not lose $150 than earn $200.

So of course I’m nervous as heck this week, because my brain is immediately panicking about the prospect of losing the gains made using my current set-up.

It does not help that the benefits of the new set-up still sit on the far end of a whole bunch of work, and if there’s one thing our brains hate worse than risk, it’s spending energy on something that might not pay off.

But the truth is, that’s writing.

Lots of people equate it with gambling, because so much of what we do is outside of our control.

I don’t really hold with that. There is luck involved in a writing career, but you control how many times you roll the dice. You can’t control what sells, but you can control what you put out into the world, how many risks you take, and how you build your profile as a writer.

The real perk of writing is just how many things pay off when you’ve been running for a while. Stories that are worth very little when you first write them pick up readers.

Creating the story takes time, but leveraging an asset you’ve already created can take no time at all. There are short stories that have made me hundreds of dollars in reprint fees because I spent five seconds typing an email.

Each new asset is worth slightly more than the one before either, and every elevation brings the total value of what you create up.

When my nerves get the better of me, this is what I focus on.

---

---

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

Patronage: Want to ask me questions directly and be part of a great writing community? Join the GenrePunk Ninja Patreon!

Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.

Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.

It’s hard to get excited about infrastructure when you’re a writer. For one thing, our infrastructure needs are pretty basic when we start out, to the point where it’s almost invisible. As we grow, those same infrastructural needs accumulate slowly and operate in the background.

Of course, there’s also the broader social problem of writers being encouraged not to think of themselves as a small business because what we do is art, not commerce. Most writers realise the business requires both too late, and their haphazard infrastructure is what they run with.

Personally, I learned about infrastructure because I started applying for small business grants and mentorships with Brian Jar Press. To fill out forms, I needed to describe the business infrastructure of the press and the various strengths and weaknesses.

Invariably, when I handed these over and talked to mentors about it, they’d look down the list and frown. “Is that it?”

I’d assure them it was.

“That doesn’t seem like a lot for the profit projection.”

I assured them it was fine. They’d express their doubts and suggest we monitor things once the mentorship started, but it was rare that the infrastructure caused a problem. Only once was there a legitimate, long-term issue (my Mac laptop broke, which killed my ability to produce ebooks because the business-critical software on it didn’t have an easy-to-transition to PC equivalent. I’ve since bought a backup Mac). 

WRITING: BASELINE INFRASTRUCTURE

In this context, business infrastructure refers to the physical, technological, and social assets that serve as the foundation of a business and allow it to scale (or limit its growth). The stuff that both enables your business, but also limits your capacity. 

In non-writing businesses, this can encompass the offices and warehouses a company uses, the computer networks, data back-ups, waste disposal systems, hiring practices, management protocols, and more. These often exist within a broader social infrastructure, predicated on government choices about transport, health, and other details.

These shape your business.

Some businesses are notably infrastructure-heavy. Manufacturing, for example, needs a huge outlay to acquire the machines and the workforce that keeps things running. It requires storage space and shipping logistics and other large-scale infrastructural choices.

Some businesses are infrastructure-light. Writing at its most basic is incredibly light on infrastructure. I started my writing career with a cheap notepad, a pencil, a borrowed computer and printer, and a couple of stamps. That’s all I needed to write and revise a story, and submit it for the first time.

These days, you don’t even need stamps.

Compared to starting even a simple small business, like a craft stall selling hand-printed art, the infrastructure needs are minimal. These days, I don’t even need to buy stamps as long as I’ve got a link to the internet (and the modern world has made it near impossible to exist without being online in some form).

Even as my career picked up speed, my infrastructure remained pretty minimal:

• Internet access

• Notebooks for brainstorming

• Cheap laptop with a word processor

• A website for hosting information about my work.

• Social media accounts.

That was enough to sell fifty short stories and a couple of short books. There were expenses—internet access isn’t cheap in Australia, and website hosting cost a bundle—but it was still under $1,000 a year to run my business if I didn’t pay for a dedicated writing space.

But just because your infrastructure is simple—or cheap—doesn’t mean that it doesn’t affect your business. 

A REALLY SIMPLE EXAMPLE

A few years ago, I moved in with my spouse for the first time, squeezing both our belongings into a cheap one-bedroom flat. One thing we noticed quickly: my writing is loud.

For years, I’d been using old-school mechanical keyboards with individual switches under each key. I loved those fuckers because they’re tactile and durable and you know you’ve hit each key. But I also learned to touch-type at the start of my writing career, and I type fast. 

Around 90-odd words a minute when transcribing a pre-written. Double that when I’m pulling words out of my head and producing a story. Do that on a mechanical keyboard, and it’s much like sitting next to a machine gun trying to take down a helicopter. 

This isn’t great when the person you live with, in a tiny space, wants to watch TV, or concentrate on their book, or wants to have a bit of peace and quiet after a long day’s work. It’s seriously bad when said person suffers migraine aura and loud, clattering noise is a constant searing pain.

The most practical solution to the problem was buying a new keyboard. Something quieter. So, I did a bunch of research and picked up a scissor-switch keyboard. Slimmer, low profile, and most importantly—quieter. I still needed to muffle the thing from time to time, but it was great. 

I could type while my spouse was home without fear!

Within weeks, my writing progress tanked. I didn’t write when I should have been, and when I wrote, I produced far fewer words than expected. 

I pay close attention to days when I feel like I’m falling behind, because it’s usually a sign I’m not managing my anxiety the way I should, so I started working through my system to figure out what was wrong. I did a whole bunch of self-care work, then went back and reviewed my notes around each writing day.

This time, the problem wasn’t anxiety. It was the new keyboard. Apparently, when typing at high speed, I wasn’t hitting the Shift key right because the scissor switches there were temperamental. They wanted me to hit the key dead centre, but years of high-speed typing on far more rugged keyboards left me with a bad habit of touching the very edge of the key.

And because I wasn’t hitting that key right, I either slowed down to fix more errors (ugh!) or left them and had to spend more time fixing errors at the end of the draft (double ugh!).

My subconscious brain, ever the problem solver, realised I could avoid all that extra work by just…not finishing projects. Writing wasn’t paying my rent in this era, so the adverse effects of not getting things done on my personal deadlines were minimal, so why create more work for myself? There was other stuff I could focus on in those hours that was less frustrating.

It seemed a stupid reason to avoid write, and it is. But I’ve been here before. Our brains are problem solving machines, and if you’re not paying attention to the real problem, they’ll go with the simplest solution.

If writing is frustrating, don’t write. Easy. 

Ergo, when infrastructure isn’t working for you, the best thing to do is change the infrastructure and see how it affects things. 

So I bought another keyboard. Still quiet, but with a different design, and a shift key that worked.

Within days, the problem went away. I was producing stories at the speed I expected, and they fit into the editing hours allocated to them.

It cost me an extra $200 for that keyboard, but once it allowed me to finish two or three stories that year, that extra cost was covered and I was better placed to write more for years to come. 

CHANGING MY TECH STACK

Of course, my infrastructure needs are simple anymore. Once you tack publishing books and running a web store onto the business of writing, your infrastructure needs expand. 

These days, I don’t just need a website — I need the store software and various plugins to optimise it and methods of shipping and tracking books. I need design software so I can create book covers, and access to stock art, and font licenses, and storage for all the books we ship.

We’re preparing to move in December/January of this year, and I’m quietly excited because the new place has storage space and a home office. A simple infrastructure shift, but it changes my business model. 

Suddenly I can move from doing really short print runs (20 to 50 books) to discounted runs of 100 to 200 copies of a new release, earning more money per book. I can organise afternoon and evening meetings without feeling like I’m imposing on my partner (my office shares space with our living room).

On the other hand, I have a tech stack that costs a great deal of money to run every month. I’ve just done my preliminary tax paperwork for the Australian financial year, which ends in June, and looked at what everything is costing, what’s working, and what isn’t.

Ergo, there are changes coming to the website. Some of it is the site getting a little long in the tooth (my current website is 18 years old this year and has four or five distinct looks). 

Some of it is slowly increasing costs on the tech front. Running a store, for example, comes with a monthly cost. To break even on just being online, I need to sell nearly 35 to 40 books across Brain Jar Press and GenrePunk Books.

In good months, that’s not a problem. The stores do a pretty brisk trade when I’m actively promoting and running newsletters.

But the problem isn’t the good months. Selling books was an uphill battle during the US elections last year, and has become an uphill battle again now that US politics are a twenty-four seven spectacle. As a writer and a publisher, I trade on attention. 

The basic promise of a book is, “Give this a few hours of your attention, and it will provide valuable information or entertainment.”

When folks feel like they need to fix their attention on the news, for fear they’ll miss something that’s about to turn their life upside down, there’s just less attention going around that can be monetised by fiction.

It doesn’t help that the six months where people had spare attention, my time was occupied by cyclones, holes in walls, and wrangling the strata committee of our apartment block to get things repaired (seven months of the walls leaking every time it rains and counting. Things are finally moving in the right direction, though).

On top of that, I made some big swings over the last year to two that hadn’t panned out the way I expected. Splitting GenrePunk Books and Brian Jar Press has a lot of upsides to it, but it presents infrastructure problems. 

My GenrePunk Books newsletter gains readers at about three times the speed of Brain Jar Press, for example, because there are things I can do with my fiction (giveaways, newsletter promo deals) that I wouldn’t do with someone else’s.

Meanwhile, Brian Jar Press books sell better once a new customer has found the store, because there are a lot of options and a lot of brilliant authors there and, frankly, most of them have a lot more prestige than I do.

Splitting the stores meant I increased my infrastructure costs by 50 to 60%, but left both stores weaker. GenrePunk gets more new readers, but has less to sell them. Brain Jar Press sells more books to the current readers but is slower to acquire new customers.

The split also didn’t have the effect I hoped for—almost everyone continued to refer to GenrePunk Books releases as Brian Jar Press releases, anyway. The two imprints are intertwined in most folks’ heads. 

Given time, I could probably get the distinction to catch on, but that’s a trick to pull when the finances aren’t as close to the bone right now. 

So while I’m keeping the newsletters separate, part of my shift is moving both imprints over to the same store and the same newsletter system. This will make it easier to double down on some strategies that are working (mentioning Brain Jar books in the GenrePunk opening newsletter) and generating sales for both imprints. 

It’s not ideal, but it keeps both companies running on what has been a pretty lean year on the publishing front. It also lets my personal website go back to being a blog, which I’ve missed, and decanters my writing from being exclusively a self-published thing as I switch up my strategy on that front. 

Switching websites and systems is a big job. It’ll take me about three weeks, during which I’ll be setting aside my writing time to get it all done. The upfront cost of doing it is going to hurt, especially given how lean my yearly profit has been.

It will also drop the yearly cost of running both sides to a third of what I’m currently paying, making every book I sell a little more profitable (and, coincidentally, bringing my break-even point down to what we’ve been selling over the last twelve months).

So, like swapping my keyboard out for something that works better, the logic is simple: the short-term cost of doing this will help keep my business running long-term, and set up a business infrastructure that makes it easier to grow.

ACTION PLAN: INSTITTUE A QUARTERLY INFRASTRUCTURE CHECK-IN

Chanigng my websites  isn’t the only infrastructure change I’ve made over the last twelve months, just the largest. I make it a point to check on things every three months, looking at every aspect of my business and asking questions about what could make things better. 

Earlier this year, I noticed my projections were way off and realised we had a problem with shipping (it was three times more expensive than I’d projected, because my brain was still back in 2022). Three months before that, I cut back on a piece of software that was useful, but not essential enough to justify the yearly expense. 

I suspect, three months from now, I’ll be squinting at one of my key software subscriptions (adobe) and debating whether it’s time to switch to an alternative. 

At every step, I look at the physical infrastructure too: is my desk layout working for me? Could I change the books within easy reach of my desk and speed up what I do? Do any computer components need replacing? I recently upgraded my mouse after realizing my old model was getting long in the tooth, and I was resisting doing covers because the mouse hiccuped.

Admittedly, I didn’t learn to do this in isolation. A big part of thinking this way came from reading Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First (recommended to any writer) and Profit First for Ecommerce (recommended to any writer running their own web store). 

Thinking about your infrastructure as part of the flow of profit and loss in your business is incredibly valuable, and I credit Michalowicz’s book with transforming Brain Jar Press from a hobby to a small profit-earning business in the space of a few weeks. 

The Wellness Industrial Complex has does a pretty good job of co-opting the idea of self-care and turning it into an aspirational lifestyle choice rather than ongoing maintenance of physical and mental health. The whole idea of self-care is now associated with affluence and privilege, or a kind of low-budget hedonism where pizza and Netflix where folks who can’t afford spa days and wellness make do with the small, ironic pleasures afforded to them.

And it’s not surprising, because actual self-care starts with small things that are incredibly hard to do when you’re actually in need of self-care.

Case in point: going to bed at a reasonable hour.

For me, this means getting my shit together at 9:30 and being in bed by ten, preferably without a screen nearby to distract me and keep me awake. That affords me a good eight-hour window in which I can sleep prior to my six AM “get up and write” alarm, even if I’m going to wake up after five or six hours because eight hours’ sleep seems beyond me.

I know this, and I know my life is smoother when I stick to the ten PM bedtime, and yet it takes effort to actually achieve it. It’s always tempting to stay up later—one more TV show, one more chapter, just a little more fucking around on the phone.

I pay a price for every hour I stay up past bedtime—a price in the amount of work done, the state of my mental health, and my trust in the routines that keeps things moving forward—so it’s almost never the right choice long-term, but humans aren’t built for long-term thinking. It’s not our default.

Real self-care is hard and incredibly goddamned basic and requires sacrificing the pleasures of now for the long-term gains. It starts with simple choices:  Go to bed at a reasonable hour, eat enough vegetables, do the stretches that help ease the lingering pain, stick to your routine.

All basically free—no affluence required—but it’s not as fun as self-care as lifestyle brand and incredibly hard to do.