Three Things Writers Actually Sell That Aren’t Books, Really

I keep meaning to sit down and write another extended post about writing and business plans, but the topic is large and tangled and crazy, and my time for blogging is short and controlled and subservient to the task of getting things written.

So I have not written a blog post about basing your business plan off what you actually sell as a writer, not what you think you sell, but I have written 22,000 words of a novella in the space of seven days and stand a good chance of finishing the whole thing over the weekend.

I am comfortable with that trade-off, right now.

But the short version of the long and tangled post that I did not write goes something like this – if you are building a business plan about your writing, you need to forget about the book as the thing you’re selling and start considering the other things.

First, that you’re actually selling permission to use copyright, which means you are leveraging copyright options on everything you write in order to make money. The money in writing is not invested in a single piece of work – it’s in the ability to keep selling work over and over.

That works better when you have a lot of things to leverage, built up over time, than it does when you’re trying to earn a living wage off a book or two. It also changes your relationship with certain parts of writing – I was talking to a friend about writing guest posts to promote a book, and their feeling that it was a lot of writing for free, and my first response was, no, you just haven’t been paid for it yet; you can do a non-fiction collection one of these days, even if you do it yourself.

Honestly, if you do not understand copyright and how writers use it to earn income, do not try to write a business plan yet. Focus on learning this bit first.

So, after copyright, you need to acknowledge that as a writer you have a skill-set that is valuable, and people will actually pay you for it. I’ve made my career out of writing and writing-related jobs for the bulk of the last twenty years, and largely I’ve done it by virtue of having skills, a network, and the ability to apply what I do as a fiction writer to other tasks.

People will pay you to write things that are not fiction. People will pay you to teach them about how writing works. People will pay you to offer your learned opinions on topics, based on your research or your body of work or the ideas at the heart of your fiction.

You skill-set has value, and there are plenty of writers who have leveraged that to earn income outside of their fiction.

Third, and this is the serious one, what you actually sell people isn’t stories or books or even skills. What you sell people is a little slice of identity – tokens that tell them who they are and what they believe in. I’m just going to link to a piece about Vidcon by Jeff Jarvis, which looks at this in the even crazier world of internet content development:

I learned at Vidcon that what we call content is not an end-product. It is a social token. It is something that people make, remake, or pass around to say something about themselves or their relationships with their friends. It might speak for them or it might illustrate their opposition to an idea. It serves their conversations. It is not a destination.

What I Learned At VidCon

Understanding this distinction is serious business in the 21st century, where writers and readers are smack up against each other, engaging one-on-one, instead of having a relationship mediated by booksellers and editors and publishers and agents.

This idea of content as social token is what fuels things like kickstarter and patreon and fan-events and literary festivals, and while it’s getting leveraged in different ways here in the early parts of the 21st century, it’s always been a part of how writers have made their living.

Go read Jarvis’ piece. It’s worth it.

Not all of this will work the same way for every writer. Some genres work better with the folks who really just want to leverage having hundreds of books for sale, some genres work better when it comes to developing the writers who work there into social tokens that festivals consider valuable enough that they’ll pay for their attendance. Some genres lend themselves to blogging, and some people do not.

But those three will give you a framework to start considering how working writers are earning income from their work, and start figuring out where, exactly, you want your own career to go over time.