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| 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.
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| 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’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.)
