On Day, You’re Going To Get Hit By A Bus

Process Knowledge, Indie Publishing, And Thinking About The Future

Yesterday I was made redundant at my current day job, which has been an interesting experience (among other things). Over the years, I’ve spent the bulk of my time in the non-profit space, working for teams that often developed what I call a “hit by the bus” problem because of their size.

Hit by a bus is a metaphor here, an evocative way of saying “people can become unavailable with no notice, and this represents a vulnerability”. There’s no non-profit I’ve ever worked for where key information and skill sets didn’t become siloed with a specific individual, and if that individual became unavailable the loss of that siloed knowledge has the potential do damage—or halt—effective operations of the business.

I’m not talking about big-picture skills, but the notion of process knowledge first identified by Dan Wang in his book Breakneck. Cory Doctorow has a great distillation of the core idea:

“It’s all the intangible knowledge that workers acquire as they produce goods, combined with the knowledge that their managers acquire from overseeing that labor. The Germans call it “Fingerspitzengefühl” (“fingertip-feeling”), like the sense of having a ball balanced on your fingertips, and knowing exactly which way it will tip as you tilt your hand this way or that.” (Doctorow, Fingerspitzengefühl)

Essentially, it’s “everything from ‘Here’s how to decant feedstock into this gadget so it doesn’t jam,’ to ‘here’s how to adjust the flow of this precursor on humid days to account for the changes in viscosity’ to ‘if you can’t get the normal tech to show up and calibrate the part, here’s the phone number of the guy who retired last year and will do it for time-and-a-half’.” (Doctorow, Fingerspitzengefühl)

Process knowledge is intangible and largely built up over years of engaging in a process. It’s the unspoken rules of getting things done efficiently and cost-effectively, and critically, it’s not something a company can buy or sell, and therefore doesn’t exist on a balance sheet. Process knowledge is often born of experience and indelibly tied to the worker who earned that experience.

Small organisations have a lot of issues around relying on process knowledge and being unable to spread it around. When you’ve got a group of people working for not a lot of money, trying to do too much, then there’s precious little time to cross-train or document key procedures, much less spare someone to work in an area long enough to build up their own process knowledge. The nature of non-profit work is that there’s never enough – not enough hours, not enough money, not enough time. You end up relying on process knowledge, but being unable to afford it long term.

I expected something similar when I went into the corporate world, and it surprised me how different things were. My current day job at a sizable corporate entity, and for the first time I didn’t feel the weight of process knowledge (my own, or my reliance on the process of knowledge of others). There are entire teams doing what I did daily, and taking time off means someone swiftly and efficiently stepped into my spot. It wasn’t perfect – one of the most refreshing things about my current team leader was the way he stepped in and focused on what needed documenting and how to improve it – but it was…relaxing. A relief.

For someone who has always felt slightly guilty about taking leave, and in the past has had to work on every holiday I took because no-one else knew how to do tech support for the site we managed—the capacity to spend a few days off work and know someone had it covered was amazing.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t that worried about the hit-by-a-bus problem.

Which is why being made redundant alongside 200 other people in my division Australia-wide is an interesting experience. A company that essentially didn’t have to worry about the hit by a bus problem just fed the collective procedural knowledge of its operations division and its collective process knowledge into a wood chipper with a two-month window to hand over everything they knew.

Process knowledge doesn’t pass on easily. If it did, it would be less valuable. The nature of the handover means certain things were prioritized and certain things were not…and the gaps are really showing now that all the outgoing staff are four working days away from hanging up our swipe cards and keyboards.

There is a growing number of times people are saying, “Oh shit, what about…” and pulling together stop-gap fixes, which inevitably break as they run into the limits of the new person’s knowledge.

For the team I work with, full of people who take pride in their work and their contributions, it’s frustrating to watch. Not least because we know that in a week’s time, it’s going to be so much worse for our replacements because the people who know how stuff works are no longer at the other end of a phone.

As ever, my experiences in the outside world make me think about writing.

Folks running writer businesses tend not to think about the hit-by-a-bus problem. We are, much of the time, a one-person business who either works in partnership with a publisher or—with ebooks—with a distributor who helps get our books in front of people. Usually, the writer is owner and sole employee. So if a bus hit a writer, the business just stops because there is no business without the writer. Who needs to think about contingency plans and coverage?

No doubt some of you, if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, are already seeing the flaws of this thinking. For those who haven’t, here’s the four things I’d ask you to consider:

1. Writing isn’t a business built around generating intellectual property assets, which are then leveraged to bring in income. A writer hit by a bus can still potentially earn money through the assets they’ve already created.
2. The copyright on the assets you create lasts for your lifetime, plus 75 years, which means your heirs might profit on work you generated decades ago.
3. The traditional model of the writer’s business, where they turn intellectual property over to stakeholders like agents and publishers who can leverage skills and connections, means that other people can generate profit on your behalf. It’s also a complicated business that is rarely understood by newcomers.
4. The newly emergent independent model, where writers distribute books themselves through platforms like Amazon and Kobo and direct sales channels, push more of a burden on the rights holder to promote and leverage the assets for a greater cut of the cover price.

Which brings us to the writer version of the hit-by-a-bus problem that very few people think about: who can leverage your intellectual property if you’re incapacitated? What is their capacity? So much of what we do as writers, let alone writer-publishers, is predicated on hard-won process knowledge that simply handing the intellectual property over to someone doesn’t guarantee they’ll make the same income from it.

Most writers are woefully under-prepared for what might happen if they needed to keep earning money from their assets while incapacitated, let alone have it earn money for their heirs. This is especially true for indie authors. I’d challenge anyone who thinks otherwise to answer three simple questions:

1. Are your intellectual property assets accounted for in your will?
2. Can your heir access your KDP account and other distribution points, and while there, are they legally allowed to collect the income earned under the terms of your agreement with that distributor?
3. Do you have someone else who can log onto your website and social channels on your behalf?

I think about this a lot, and have done for years, and I’m looking at three pretty basic questions and realise that I can only answer yes to one of them.

I remember, back when my dad died, the questions about what happened to the ebook library and Amazon account he’d “shared” with my mother were a nightmare to unravel. I suspect things are much worse when there’re ebook rights tangled up in there.

And this doesn’t even account for the next step, even if you answer yes to all three questions. Monetizing the publication rights isn’t just a matter of putting the book out into distribution — these days it’s a matter of knowing how to work your assets. Which social media platforms do you promote on, and what keeps your readership alive when the author is no longer writing a newsletter? What makes a suitable cover, and when should it be refreshed? Which promotions are worth the money, and which exist to subtract money from a writer with no real benefit? We know those AI-generated emails about great writing opportunities, expressing vociferous enthusiasm for our work, are trying to scam us out of money, but is the same true of your non-publishing heir who has never received one before?

I’m highlighting the issues of self-publishing here because they’re the most pressing for me, but also because the vast majority of writers have self-published something even if it’s just a newsletter archive or blog (all intellectual profit, as both You Don’t Want To Be Published and the Brian Jar Press Writer Chaps line show).

But it’s also an issue for traditionally published authors, whose careers and legacy can be determined by just how much procedural knowledge their heirs can bring to bear on behalf of the work.

We like to believe that the authors who get remembered have carved their legacy by being great at what they do, but having a team of heirs who understand what they have is often just as important. Edgar Rice Boroughs is an interesting case here – his estate was enormously proactive in keeping his Tarzan work in print, and expanding upon it through licensing deals and spinning off the intellectual property.

On the other hand, one perk of knowing so many anthology editors is hearing the horror stories about approaching the heirs of a now-dead writer and being quoted outrageous fees for the use of stories.

Being great at what you do is nice, but leaving your assets in the hands of an entity willing to keep your stories and books in the conversation is the more important determinant of which writers get to be remembered.

It’s easy to disregard the process knowledge we build up as writers active within our industry, both because we’ve been cultural pressured to disregard the value of what we do (“there’s no money in writing”) and because we’ve built up our knowledge base over several years or decades in the business, almost without noticing it.

A few years back, I was talking to a colleague who had a dual major in law and editing, primed to become an agent. I pitched an idea to them for a long-term business that I still think has some legs.

Traditional publishing used to do some of that for author estates if the editors saw value in the author’s work. I’m not sure the same thing happens with the economies of scale associated with self-publishing, where so much of the income is predicated on long backlist sales rather than a critical, velocity driven sales push.

And self publishing is still new enough that we haven’t really seen many of the folks who built a career their die and pass their work on to heirs, so the litmus test of just how much process knowledge an indie backlist requires to be income-earning is yet to be tested. My gut says it’s considerable, though, and becoming the go-to resource for newly inherited writer heirs to figure out how to manage the new assets they received, then building up a team that can monetize them long term, has the potential to be huge in the next decade and probably won’t slow down.

That colleague didn’t run with the idea, instead going into a traditional editing role (which, honestly, is great for them. They were fucking ideal for it and probably happier). I do still think there’s going to be a space for someone doing something like this and making a killing, though.

And, if I’m honest, I want something like this to exist. I’m old enough now that it’s pretty clear I won’t be around forever, and I’m kinda grateful for that because my joints already hurt most mornings. I’ve got a lot of work that I’ve generated and—hopefully—will write a considerable number of new books and stories and other stuff before I croak, but leaving it all to my spouse or my sister to figure out how to monetise after my death is a lot.

I try to lock down as much of my process knowledge and philosophies about publishing as I can – it’s one reason I write about writing and publishing so much – but everything I lock down makes me all too aware of other things that should go with it.

One thing is certain, though: I will be “hit by a bus” one day, and everything I’ve done will become an asset that gets passed on to someone else. A metric fuck ton of books and stories without the process knowledge that helped keep them viable.

And after watching a company gut an entire division, and seeing the carnage wrought as all that missing process knowledge is suddenly filled with a new team figuring out what to do at the same time, I’m more conscious than ever of just how quickly “inherited assets” can become “a fucking nightmare” without the writer’s decades of knowledge to back it up.