Good afternoon darling one,
Today a story, a lesson, and a direction.
Once upon a time there was a little girl in rural Australia who knew she was a writer as soon as she could hold a pen.
Writing seemed like The Thing To Be Doing.
It became her mission, her vision, the one and only thing to do.
She, like many fledgling writers, spent an entire childhood writing. Stories, journals. By the time she was 18, she had such a vast number of journals that they stood half a metre high when piled against the door. Written daily, a life reflected in all of its vainglorious colours.
But, leaving home, she left them and they ended up burned, or recycled. An entire childhood documented and destroyed.
In a flash.
By the time she was a university student, she’d realised the folly of writing for writing’s sake. One must also have a job. She learned the ins and outs of editing, of critique, of publishing. Of process.
After many years freelancing on the side of whatever else was the Main Thing, our little girl realised that jobs in publishing are as rare as hen’s teeth. That the only thing is to do it yourself.
Along the way, she inadvertently stumbled on the greatest lesson of them all:
Services are fine, if you are in a required service.
But if you’re not, your only hope for business growth is in product.
Few writers learn the lesson, I’ll be honest. The ones who do end up earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. They control their manufacturing, production, and publication process. They handle everything themselves.
You can always try to gain a major publishing contract, sure. But from my perspective, that requires an agent (which is competitive and hard to find), who gives a shit (which is tough), who is able to sell your work to a publisher (who won’t accept it unless you have an agent). And you still have to do a lot of work to sell your work to the public.
Which is why I’ve slowly started to turn the ship around at Brutal Pixie to focus on product.
Without product, a writer is almost always an employee.
Without product, a writer is always subject to the winds and whims of the market.
But a writer who creates product, who creates a media empire of whatever sort, is better able to build the lifestyle it wants or needs.
That’s some of the thinking behind the emergence of Sunrise Books, for which the first title is hitting the public in two days’ time. You can pre-order it here.
If a writer doesn’t create product, it must create a personality, perspective, and reputation that is beyond compare. And then create a situation in which people will wait for them, will pay whatever they ask, and will be happy with the outcome.
Yes, it’s still a service, but it’s a service pushed to the point of mastery.
Are the two incompatible? Not at all; in fact, the best in the world combine the two.
This, my friend, is the direction in which I’ll be pushing Brutal Pixie in the coming years. Mastery, on the one hand; empire, on the other.
It’s taken me a while to think my way through this, what with pregnancy, challenges to my thinking in terms of what the business is doing and where it’s going, how to handle my own time out and all that jazz.
But this is the right direction. It’s time for me to level up in terms of driving forward on both counts. Not just because I am, and always have been, a publisher; but also because mastery has always been on the back of the cards I’ve played in my life.
I’ve realised lately that I can have both, that I can do this and grow a little person and start a family, and that the three are completely compatible.
It’s the total opposite direction from all advice that I’ve received.
But in the famous words of one of my advisors:
Whatever all the normal people say to do, do the opposite.
So it is, that this is what I’m doing, as I stare down both 7 years in business and motherhood in the same year. And all I can say is: Game on.