Happy Fourth of July! Here in the United States, we celebrate the 4th, also known as Independence Day, to commemorate our independence from England. It’s fitting that I’m giving this business update on July 4th because both of those things represent independence.
Today’s post is my second business update. About a month ago, I released my very first business update post. If you read that one, I hope you enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun to put together and I intend on doing a business update post the first Sunday of each month.
I hope these updates give you some insight into my business, as well as some ideas and motivation for your own writing and business. In addition, I hope that you can learn from my mistakes and failures along the way, which I will freely share with you as much as I can.
Let’s dive in and start with the biggest chunk of my writing business, which is ghostwriting.
Ghostwriting
Not a lot has changed since my last update, except for adding another ghostwriting client. That, of course, is always a welcome addition to my business. I also have several possible books that can happen in the next few months, but we will see.
For the moment, I’m getting close to my capacity as a ghostwriter. I could probably handle one additional book over the next three months, but that’s it.
Now that I have several projects going, one of the challenges that I am learning how to deal with is keeping clients enthusiastic throughout the process. Now you might think, why would clients get tired in this process since you are doing all the work for them?
Well, that is not quite true. Typically, the client is involved in a bunch of calls, especially in the early 2-3 months of the process. They are also reading drafts of the work and are highly involved.
My clients are generally business professionals and entrepreneurs, so they are quite busy and often traveling. For example, recently, a client had to reschedule our call four times because of travel. That kind of thing does not usually happen to such a large extent, but it is not unusual at all to reschedule calls because of their busy lives.
The way that I try to handle this is by keeping the vision of the book in front of them. Writing a book, even if you were the client, takes about six months from start to finish, at least. Part of my job is keeping the enthusiasm going.
As time goes on, I’m learning more and more how to run an efficient business. There are a lot of moving parts to a ghostwriting business. So, whatever kind of business you’re in, I encourage you to keep plugging away and continually learning.
The Daily Writer
As I’ve mentioned before, there are several parts to the Daily Writer: the community, the podcast, and products. The community continues to go well, and I’m having a blast seeing our group grow and take action toward their writing goals. If you haven’t yet considered joining the group, you can check it out here.
Of course, I’m plugging away with this podcast. Many people have asked how I keep up with a daily podcast like this. Well, the truth is that it’s indeed a lot of work, but I also create it in batches. For example, I typically write and record a week’s worth of episodes at one time. So, there are ways to make it a lot more efficient than doing the work every single day.
One of the things I’m very excited about, looking toward the long term, is developing some products for the Daily Writer. I’ve been talking to a couple of manufacturers who could help with some different products like card decks, journals, planners, and other things. This area is totally new for me, so we’ll see where that goes. This research into products initially started with a couple of ideas for client books, but as often happens, I learn from clients and what they want to do, and I can apply those lessons to my own books and business, and vice-versa.
On the writing front, I’m continuing work on two books. The first is Kickstart Your Creativity, which will come out in October. The second is The Daily Writer, which will come out next October. A couple of weeks ago, I took one full day and categorized all the daily podcast episodes into sections I’m using for the Daily Writer book. If you weren’t aware of it before now, what I’m doing in the weekday podcast episodes is writing the daily meditations for the Daily Writer book as I go along. So, those short little episodes are actually serving two purposes—the first is for the podcast itself, and the second is for book material.
I was surprised this week when I discovered that I had written 170 of these daily episodes since November, when I started this daily podcast. I’m almost halfway there to my goal of 366 daily meditations for writers. It’s pretty cool what you can accomplish when you work on something consistently week to week.
Personal Update
I always want to include some personal updates within these business updates, because I’m not just some robot doing this podcast. I’m a real live person who’s behind the mic, and you are as well. One advantage, I think, of the past year with the pandemic is that we are all more willing to accept the humanity of other people we’re doing business with. We’re all people, you know, and there are stories and names behind every business transaction.
I want to briefly touch on three things in my personal life from the last few weeks.
The first is that I ran a 5k with my brother. Now, I understand that a 5k is not big in the running world. In fact, it’s probably the most common type of race, and only a little over 3 miles, so it’s not even that far. I’ve run a couple of 5k’s before, as well as a 10k, so this wasn’t necessarily a new thing.
However, one thing to remember is that 99% of people never even run a race. Actually, I don’t know the exact number, but you get my point. Just by being at the race, you’re already part of an elite group, so to speak. Running this 5k has made me want to do more of these and get in better shape.
The second thing is that my wife, Melanie, and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary on June 15. Now there are all kinds of wonderful things I could say about her, but the one thing I want to focus on here is how important it is to have a supportive partner in your life. Now for those of you who are single, I’m not saying you’re deficient in any way, or anything of that nature. Not at all. I’m just saying that if you’re married, or thinking about getting married, it’s critical for your partner to be supportive of what you do as a writer.
My wife has always been my biggest supporter, hands down. It has made a massive difference in my confidence and ability to focus and build my business. It really has.
The final thing I want to throw out there as far as a personal update is that I’m thinking about renting a co-working space here in town. I haven’t decided yet, but I’m wondering if I would be more productive than I am at home. This is a new thing I’m wrestling with and thinking about.
Well, friends, that’s pretty much it for my July 2021 business update. I hope you find these helpful and that you are taking away one or two things you can apply to your writing or business.