The Business of Writing

I had the good fortune to attend an event at church House in Westminster last week, run by the Intellectual Property Office. The event was entitled Ideas To Growth, and provided businesses and business support services with excellent ideas and advice on how to best protect and exploit the Intellectual Property developed by a business. It was interesting to learn that many businesses are not even aware of some of the intellectual property they are creating through what they might think are everyday changes they are making to their operations, but often these could protectable. We heard from some successful small business owners, including Gold Genie, Chillipeeps and Sugru, who all espoused the importance of protecting your assets when you’re starting out in business. The event also touched upon how to best use and exploit that IP to further and grow your business. This is no surprise to anyone in the restive arts; any writer worth their salt knows at least a little about plagiarism and copyright laws. Furthermore, and what perhaps slightly fewer writers realise, there are two types of intellectual property; that which requires protection through processes requiring applications (i.e. patents, and trademarks), and that which is automatically protected through publication, i.e. anything that appears in print, or online, which can be traced to its original publication date. Luckily, with writing it’s essentially pretty simple: our writing is our IP, and most writing falls into the latter category of IP, so most writers are protected by default and don’t require patents, which is very fortunate for the struggling writer who wouldn’t be able to afford expensive IP attorneys. What was far more interesting to me was the idea of exploiting the intellectual property. Again, traditionally this is a very simple process: writer writes manuscript; manuscript is accepted by agent; agent sells to publishing house; house publishes book; public buys book; and royalties from the sales filter back to the writer. But this got me thinking; in such a bear-pit of an industry, are there any other ways to monetise one’s manuscript? There is self-publishing, of course, but this is essentially the same route but cutting out the middle man for higher percentages of profits, but with the compromise of much-reduced powers of marketing and reach. So, I was wondering how much further an independent writer could take him or herself without the might of the publishing house? As creative types, perhaps we aren’t always geared towards the business side of things, and might even see it as ‘selling out,’ but it’s something I’m increasingly interested in, and I suppose anybody who wants to make a living out of doing this stuff should do the same, given the increasing difficulty and risk-aversion of the publishing houses. So I’ll be giving a bit more thought to the following over the next few weeks: - Content - Products - Crowdfunding - Use of social media - The creation of the author and his/her work as a brand - Image and brand - Collaboration and quid pro quo between writers