Writing Books as a Small, Home-Based Business
April 9, 2010 by MikeFook
A couple statements from Jim Blasingame of the SBA (Small Business Administration in the USA).
Small businesses make up more than 99.7% of all employers.
Home-based businesses account for 53 percent of all small businesses.
Writing books in a room in your house is a small business that many of you can do, are doing, or will do in the near future.
The year is 2010. A writer is someone that writes. Eventually the idea is to get paid for it, but, you can call yourself a writer well before you get paid for it. Just like a horse trainer that teaches her own horses tricks doesn’t get paid for it until she finds or creates a job for herself getting paid to teach horses tricks.
Van Gogh’s life was painting and yet for a long time he wasn’t paid for his work at all – he finally sold just one painting, the only one he ever sold. Would you call Van Gogh an artist?
This silly notion that you’re only a writer when you’ve sold something needs to be dismissed by anyone serious about the craft. My brother filled many notebooks with original songs, stories, and diary entries, and yet he wouldn’t consider himself a writer. He says he’s a software tester.
So, it’s not automatic… but, if you identify yourself as a writer – you can call yourself a writer to everyone you meet.
Writing books, ebooks, articles, or sales copy can be a small business you can start in your home – in a separate room and call yourself a writer. You can deduct the room for tax purposes if you don’t do anything else there (see IRS for specifics, it’s more involved than that). If you can’t write at home you can deduct hotel visits where you can write, uninterrupted with plenty of air conditioning and relative quiet.
The book world, like the newspaper world is changing dramatically. Paper-based books are going away and being replaced with something infinitely more flexible, more profitable, more instantaneous than waiting for half-a-year for your paperback book to be published with a printing press.
Ebook writers are a dime-a-dozen, but the cream of the crop will rise and make enough to live on.
If you love to write, and have something to say about a topic, or many topics, start writing now and producing ebooks as you go. The experience will help you figure out what topics you can write about successfully. It will teach you about editing. You’ll learn how to call on some force inside – determination – to help you finish each book you start. You’ll start interacting with other writers, authors, and those in the ebook publishing, audio publishing, and vook publishing world.
Start writing ebooks now as an education, preparing you for becoming part of the cream that is rising to the top.
If any of your books have Thailand as a subject, send them to www.ThailandeBooks.com to see if they’ll publish them digitally for you and sell them on their site.
If not, find another digital publisher that can help. I’ll write more about options for self-publishing, born-digital books in a future post. Stay tuned… there are many options to jump on while the jumping is good.
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