Start-Ups: Awesome, Inc.

The world is your oyster.

Louis Shalako

Four out of five start-ups fail within the first two years. 

The most common reason for that failure is insufficient initial capitalization.

But I started my business for free, so that wasn’t much of a problem.

In many cases, as little as $500.00 a month in additional revenue would have been enough to support the business through some early crises and it might have gone on to become successful.

However, the proprietors saw nothing but costs, bills piling up and no new and substantial sources of income looming on the horizon. Rather than take inordinate risks with their own or with other people’s money, (OPM), they choose to wind it down. Sometimes that is the reasonable thing to do.

I’ve operated a few small businesses, so small in some cases that Sir Richard Branson wouldn’t have been able to see them through a scanning electron microscope.

Four out of five start-ups fail within the first two years. The most common reason for that failure is insufficient initial capitalization.

But I started my business for free, so that wasn’t much of a problem.

In many cases, as little as $500.00 a month in additional revenue would have been enough to support the business through some early crises and it might have gone on to become successful.

However, the proprietors saw nothing but costs, bills piling up and no new and substantial sources of income looming on the horizon. Rather than take inordinate risks with their own or with other people’s money, (OPM), they choose to wind it down. Sometimes that is the reasonable thing to do.

I’ve operated a few small businesses, so small in some cases that Sir Richard Branson wouldn’t have been able to see them through a scanning electron microscope.

Gina Hughes at http://www.techiediva.com/

Yet in just one example, in a business I operated, which began with zero dollars in revenue, might have gone from $880.00 in profit the first year, to $4,400.00 in year two and over $12,000.00 the third year. That business died when two major clients either went out of business themselves, or sold out to someone who found other contractors, or whatever. Since it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing anyway, I wound it up and went on to other things. It was an opportune psychological moment.

So; I have some minimal experience in reckoning costs, accounting for spending, tracking earnings, reporting income and expenses, etc. I can also produce work.

Let us assume that my little writing business, or my little publishing business, is earning a measly $500.00 a year in total income. That doesn’t even cover the cost of the internet, book cover images, proper equipment, or anything really. It merely defrays some of the costs of what looks more like a hobby than a business.

Yet those revenues began at zero, on Day Zero, which was admittedly some years ago.

In that sense, we have made it through the big danger period—those first two years when most start-ups fail. 

Our costs and our bills have never gotten so high that we couldn’t continue.

This business is scalable. As revenues grow, we can get better equipment, get better book covers, hire out formatting and proof-reading. We can put an ad in a magazine or on a website, and if we wanted to, we could incorporate, and we could hire an acquisitions editor, or become one…some of our friends on Facebook, etc, are doing just that.

They’re building up their publishing businesses, and it’s entirely up to them how far it’s going to go.

The fact that I could sign authors with a fifty-fifty royalty split and no advance, doesn’t necessarily mean that I should start taking on other authors. This business model is out there, I’ve seen it with publishers listed in a few places.

***

The real question for me is not, “How do I write a best-selling novel?”

Too many people are chasing that dragon, and throwing quite substantial fistfuls of money at it in the process.

The real question for me is how to take revenue of $40.00 or $50.00 a month and grow it into a hundred a month. Then, having learned that, the question is how to make it two hundred a month, and then four hundred. Then, having learned that, you want to make it eight hundred a month, right?

There is no ‘snow-ball effect’ here. This puppy isn’t going downhill and it isn’t gaining momentum. It’s incremental. It’s cumulative over time.

It is not a zero-sum game.

It’s uphill all the way, but the same is true in any start-up.

We expected nothing less.

As things stand presently, we can afford to keep the company going purely as a vanity venture.

We can keep it running just to have fun with it.

We can keep it going for the foreseeable future.

And there’s more.

We never have to submit a book or story to a publisher ever again if we don’t want to.

And we can still make money from our writing.

We just have to be patient and work hard.

We just have to keep doing what we love, which is writing books and stories and getting them out there for 

people to discover, to read, and ultimately, to cherish.

We don’t need anybody else’s help at all.

That’s all there is to it.

But wait.

There’s more.

The Louis pen-name doubled income in the past quarter, and four out of five pen-names are now producing income. It’s only a matter of time before the fifth pen-name gets over the threshold and starts paying royalties. Total gain for the quarter: 340 %.

In the meantime, we’re working on our thirteenth novel, our system rebuild is pretty much complete, and all of our blogs have a clean new look.*

One of our authors just sold his first book in India, (through Amazon) and another just sold his first one in Australia, also through Amazon. At this point in time, it is pretty difficult for us to promote in India, so it’s hard to see this as anything other than through passive discoverability.

A platform that we opened up only this year will pay royalties, forty-five days after the end of the first full quarter of operations. It’s not much, but it’s a start. Yes, it took time to open up this platform. We had to do some trouble-shooting, and it took some commitment. We also got in early, but this is a sign of good things to come for OmniLit and All Romance Ebooks. We can also see what sells and what doesn’t sell on that platform and proceed accordingly, with our finely-tuned electronic publishing machine.

The results may be slower than chasing trends and trying to write the next Harry Potter.

We admit that we are thinking small rather than big. We’re thinking incrementally—we’re thinking about micropayments, and that’s not the sort of thing that automatically grabs the imaginations of the inexperienced, the immature, the lax or the uncommitted.

However, some kind of result is at least achievable.

***

Don’t be fooled by the slow start.

Each and every new book or story that I produce will begin life with the benefit of four or more years of learning, in terms of publishing, and promotion, and cover design, and of course I’ve been writing for thirty years now. The cumulative and incremental effect of all those efforts will begin to take on a life of their own. 

That’s simply because there are so many titles now, and there’s more to come. I plan to write and publish as much as possible, certainly for the next few years.

Speaking purely from the business viewpoint, if I could buy a thousand bad manuscripts and get them out there for a thousand, or even ten thousand dollars, I’d be strongly tempted to do it. Now those writers would be like the painters of those ‘starving artist’ sales that come around from time to time. Let them remain anonymous, bad as that art mostly is, but someone is still making money off of their work.

***

Anyhow…

We have learned much in the last few years, and now the world is our oyster.

Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but I’ve been saving that line for a special occasion.

And this is it.

END

(*We’re using Blogger’s AwesomeInc. template in grey. Yes, we see the irony.)