Brascoe Publishing

Yes, it’s true: authors are businesses too. So, for something completely different, here’s a blog about business-y sorts of things. It has been sparked by my reading of two different websites online: Flying Solo and Australian Anthill Magazine.

I’ve been reading posts at Flying Solo – Australia’s website for what they call ‘solopreneurs’, despite Brascoe not being a solo business – for two years or more. There’s a lot of good stuff there: basic hints and tips and occasionally a good article about time management, or running a business from home, or blogging, or what-have-you.

In contrast, I’ve been reading Australian Anthill Magazine for less than half of that time. Anthill is geared towards entrepreneurs; it covers material like venture capital, really specific information about financial ratios and how to use them, interesting articles about inventions and big ideas.

The difference between the two sites is palpable: one panders to the ‘regular old small business’ (Flying Solo), and the other to the ‘enterprising business’ (Anthill). I don’t say ‘enterprising small business’ with Anthill because if you have a tiny little anthill right now, in five years it could be enormous if you play your cards right.

The differences between a regular old small business and an enterprising business might not be immediately visible to the casual observer: indeed, they may only be visible after a period of time. The things that mark a regular old small business are a regular setup, following ‘tradition’ or regular rules (in publishing this might be purely print), with the proprietors quite happy to maybe go as far as blogging but they never “get” new technology, they’re scared to make big jumps, and so on.

An enterprising business takes a regular old small business and throws ideas and glitter at it to see what happens. If you’re a publisher like us, you might dive head-first into new things: residency-style mentoring might be one, or a free online Writers’ Help Desk (if you haven’t noticed it, it’s on the right-hand side) for basic questions like style or punctuation or anything. An enterprising business sees opportunities where a regular old small business only sees things that it fears.

Of course, while we might have dived head-first into lots of things, it’s not like we’re careless. We may have poured thousands into an online music magazine for metalheads, but we knew the territory and the niche before we did: and the publication is rapidly growing a large fanbase of dedicated readers.

So, it’s probably unsurprising that in a post this week on Flying Solo, where the blogger was whingeing about not getting Twitter “because it smacks of high school”, that I realised I’d outgrown Flying Solo. I also realised that, you know what, these people are all ten years older than me, and their attitudes are so different to mine.

Posts at Flying Solo talk in whiny tones about how social networking doesn’t make money and never will, and somebody prove it to me. While Australian Anthill Magazine shows you a comparison between a print advertising campaign and a social networking campaign, and estimates what the greatest benefits are. Wow, what a difference!

So, to bring this back to you guys: if you’re a writer (published or otherwise), you can take from this a few things. These days, it doesn’t matter if you self-publish or somehow pick up a traditional publishing contract with a major publisher: if you’re active in publicising yourself and your work, then your following will grow. There’s nothing wrong with thinking like a rock star: those guys work the media and are visible for a reason.

The first way you can do this is to know your market or your niche intimately. This is vital: if you self-publish, especially, it becomes even more important.

The second is to go after your niche like a bull in a china shop. You can sit back on your laurels and dilly-dally about publicity, shudder about “not getting” technology, and wait ‘for people to buy books’. Or you can be enormously pro-active about your business (that is, your creative business of writing and selling your books), and think of exciting ways in which to publicise what you do. You might have blogs, websites, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace; you might do weird and wonderful workshops; you might do author tours through libraries or bookshops or other people’s blogs; you might hook up with other writers and come up with something totally unique. But you have to do it, make no mistake.

To conclude this post before I run on and on, I’ll just ask you one question. Which would you rather be: a regular old author, or an enterprising author who lives a vastly busier but more exciting life?