business & freedom

A while back I had a discussion about quantifying what I do for my writing business. I had never really thought about it before, but it turns out I do a lot of things by myself that many people hire out. Like, I do my own website, my own book layout, my own bookkeeping, my own marketing, and so forth. I hire out cover design, but I even do a lot of that myself. (Clarissa Yeo did the excellent cover for CLOAK GAMES: MAGE FALL, but I did the cover for CLOAK & GHOST: BLOOD RING myself.) So I do a lot of other things that aren’t related to the writing to support the writing.

I suppose this is a lot of work, but my first full-time job was unloading trucks, so my definition of “work” is probably a bit more robust than it is for many people. 🙂 Sitting in a chair pressing buttons on a keyboard is still work, but it’s less onerous work than unloading trucks or unclogging sewer lines. I know someone who used to be a prison guard, and some of his stories definitely put the idea of an unpleasant day at the office into perspective!

That said, it’s still work. But it’s necessary work to do the writing. You hear about writers who want to “just” write and let someone else handle all the messy details. But handling the messy details yourself gives you a lot of freedom.

Example! The other day I saw a lengthy Twitter rant from an award-winning, Big Name writer. She thought her publisher didn’t appreciate the kind of writing she did and had screwed her over. And she was right! Her publisher had treated her badly, and she was an award-winning, Big Name writer. If she self-published, she would have the freedom to do whatever she wanted, but I suspect she is too invested in being Prestigious Published Author to make the paradigm shift. (In fairness, it is a big mental paradigm shift.)

But by attending to the business details myself, I do have the freedom to write pretty much whatever I want, and not everyone is lucky enough to enjoy that.

-JM