How to Succeed as a Profit-Oriented Writer
Business owners make a legal, financial, and personal commitment. You need to think of yourself as a business owner, as an entrepreneur. You need to run your operations as a business. You need to make money. And you need to know how to keep the most of your money. These are all business practices.
An entrepreneur is basically anyone in business who is self-contained, self-directed, and who offers a product or service to other people.
Starting a business as a writer makes sense: a real business with profit-and-loss statements and accounting, the whole thing. There are all sorts of financial and tax advantages. Many writers, though, don’t think about starting a business, or consider themselves a business, because they think that starting a company means starting some huge conglomeration with lots of employees, lots of money coming in, etc. That may be the case as you move more into your successful future, but for now, you and your services are enough to start a one-person company and qualify yourself as an entrepreneur. Whether that is as a sole proprietorship, an LLC, a corporation, or any of the other instruments, it is up to you and your ambitions. We’ll talk more about these entities in future blogs.
Both being a writer and running your writing as a business can be painful with steep learning curves. Then, after you get your business going, there are more growth pains (or, sadly, loss pains) of keeping your writing business going. But that is how all businesses work. My goal is to help you get started and help you fight the urge to stop or give up. I’ve seen times when a writer is about to break out and they give up because their past performance does not match their ideals, while their ideals may just about to be even exaggerated by their incredible success. It’s happened to me. Many times, when I’m on the verge of saying ‘I’m done’ I remind myself immediately that ‘Something great is about to happen.’ And it does. Viewing yourself as a business, even incorporating yourself as a business, helps you keep the commitment going even when your career is not. Working for yourself is not easy, but it is so, so, rewarding. But you have to view it as a business.
Look at the mindset of where you are now. Are you a writer? Or are you a profit-oriented entrepreneur who offers an entertaining or educational service? Your future, because it affects your planning, your perception of yourself, and the perception of you by others, will highly depend upon how you see yourself.
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