Why One Equals Four
As an author, you are an entrepreneur. Every book you write is a separate enterprise, a business with its own fate and its own reckoning that balances income against expenditures.
Why One Equals Four
Every business is four businesses:
- An enterprise that creates a product or service
- A marketing business that sells what it produces
- A service business that understands that service is whatever customers want it to be
- A people business that makes the first three possible
The larger the business, the harder it is to establish and maintain personal relationships with customers, suppliers, and employees. Although they may be poor in capital, guerrillas can be rich in human capital through their relationships with the people in their networks.
One advantage you have over big businesses is that you can establish and maintain warm personal relationships, online and offline, with your readers and other allies in your assault on the citadel of fame and fortune. In the age of multinational conglomerates, consumers appreciate more than ever relationships with businesses that provide them with impeccable service and personal involvement.
According to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, one of Amazon’s goals is to be the world’s most “customer-centric” company. They want to establish relationships with customers that are so satisfying customers won’t be tempted to start from scratch and build relationships with competitors. For an entrepreneurial author, being the world’s most “reader-centric” writer is a worthy goal.
Although entrepreneurial authors are committed to the success of their businesses, they value people more than sales. They pursue their goals ethically and, whenever possible, by providing more than what they promise.
Six Tactics
Six tactics of thinking like an entrepreneurial author:
- Think new. Try to come up with fresh ideas that haven’t been done before. People like to try new things. New ideas can excite people more than ideas that have been done before, even if they were successful. If you and your networks can’t dream up something new, use your creativity to give old ideas a new twist.
- Think inclusively. Create ways to bring people together in a way so enjoyable they will tell friends about it before and after the event.
- Think big. Look at the promotional opportunities your books create with the same breadth of vision you use to look at your books in the largest possible way. Then pare your ideas down to what you can accomplish. Promotion, like politics, is the art of the possible.
- Think ideas through. Balance the time and energy you need to execute ideas against the potential gain in sales and publicity.
- Think of a way out. Set benchmarks in time and energy to see if you’re making the progress you need to make an idea worth implementing. If in the course of trying to follow through on an idea, you become convinced that the payoff won’t justify the effort, let it go and move on to the next idea.
- Think of ways to be a giving enterprise, not just a taking one. Make a virtue of commerce by helping your community while you promote your book. Schools, libraries, and charities always welcome help raising funds. You will feel better about your efforts and so will others involved with them. And the media are more likely to cover a charity event than a purely commercial one.
One reason now is such a great time to be a writer is that you can use the books you love and the authors you admire as models for creating your books and your career.
You can bring your vision, passion, and creativity to promotion, your unique ability to do the same things differently and better than they’ve been done before. One way to know you’re succeeding: Other authors use your ideas.
The more skills and interests you have, the more possibilities they will create for promoting your books So develop your skills, knowledge, and creativity as much as you can in as many fields as you can They will serve you well.
This article has been excerpted from The Entrepreneurial Author by Jay Conrad Levinson and David L. Hancock, available from Morgan James Publishing (October 2009).
