The Business Rusch: The Nook Inspiration

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I had planned to write this week’s blog on the trip to Los Angeles.  (See why I’m not in Los Angeles here.)  Instead, I’m sitting in my office, fending off a very needy cat who couldn’t even handle the 36 hours we were gone.  I shudder to think what she would have done if we had been gone for the full week we had planned on.

Before I left, I figured the trip would inspire the column.  If I took true inspiration from the actual trip, I’d write about insurance or planning for emergencies.  Of course, I dealt with both topics in the Freelancer’s Guide already.  I could also write about a usually reliable chain restaurant that we nearly stopped at, until we saw that this particular restaurant was so dingy and dirty, you couldn’t see in the windows.  Only the signs that had come directly from the home office were bright or fresh or inviting; everything else, from the hours sign to the name of the restaurant itself was faded and/or damaged.  The access road next to the restaurant had been dug up, and the mall beside it was dying.  Everything about that place screamed “fending off bankruptcy,” so of course, we drove on, to a restaurant that looked a lot more inviting.

Sad as that was—and it does haunt me, so I suspect it’ll appear in a story or blog later—I’d rather talk about the only other notable business experience on our very short trip.

On our way down, before the heat got to Dean, we stopped at a Barnes & Noble in Medford, Oregon.  I’m not sure how B&N ranks its stores, but I would consider this a small B&N.  You could stand in the main doorway and see every section of the store.

It was Monday afternoon, sunny and hot outside, cool inside.  Surprisingly, to me at least, the store was crammed with people of all ages (including, on one side of the store, a querulous elderly woman complaining that her daughter was walking so fast there was no time to look at books and, on the other side of the store, a querulous eight-year-old girl complaining that her mother was walking so fast there was no time to look at books).  A big display announcing the Nook, B&N’s new e-reader, stood a yard inside the main doorway, where the new books rack usually is.  The display was actually a booth with a gigantic sign behind it.  The booth had sides that were about shoulder high for me, with Nooks on them.  The front, though, was a table, and on it were Nooks that customers could touch.

An employee stood behind the booth, demonstrating the Nook for anyone who wanted to know how the machine worked. Sitting near him was a professorial type who was reading a Nook.  Whether or not Professor Nook was an employee is anyone’s guess, but he sure looked comfortable.

The impressive thing to me, and I do mean impressive, is that the line in front of the booth was three deep and four across for the entire time I was in the store.  I was there for at least thirty minutes.  The line remained, although individual people shuffled in and out.  These people weren’t browsing. They were interested and thinking about buying an ereader. They just weren’t sure which ereader they wanted.

I figure that at least sixty people had gone near the booth during that half an hour, most of whom asked questions.  At the checkout, I asked if this was normal. The employee there told me that there was always someone looking at the Nook, even at the deadest hours of the day.  And then she told me to come to one of their Saturday demonstrations—an actual Nook seminar—to really see a crowd.  I forgot to ask how many Nooks they sold at these events, but to be honest, I wasn’t interested in that number as much as I was interested in the interest.  For some reason, I didn’t realize that ereaders were catching on in quite this way.

I know the statistics.  Ebook sales have grown exponentially this year.  They went from less than one percent of the market to seven to ten percent (depending on which source you read).  While the growth is astonishing, seven to ten percent of the market means that 90-93% of all book sales are still paper copies.

The growth is continuing at an astonishing rate.  Most experts believe that ebooks will be a quarter of the market by the end of 2012, and half of the entire book market in 2015.  No one is saying that paper books will go away.  Personally, I think paper book sales will increase if you look at the actual number of books sold rather than the percentage of books sold, and briefly, here’s why.

Bound books have existed for thousands of years.  Mass-produced bound books have existed since Gutenberg.  Readers know and love the form.  If you love a book and must own it forever, you buy the paper version, because you know you’ll be able to read it, in that format, fifty years from now.

We don’t know what form digital books will take ten years from now, let alone fifty years from now.  I don’t base this prognosis on the idea on any book model; I base it on the music model.

Since the invention of the phonograph, people have been able to own music performed by someone not in the room.  The advent of recorded sound must have felt to the people at the time the way that the advent of the written word felt to people who had only heard stories told orally.  Suddenly something precious could be preserved.

But music preservation formats have changed.  In the late teens or early twenties, my grandfather bought my grandmother a phonograph (which we kids played with [carefully] whenever we went to her house).  She kept all the records—thick unwieldy things that wouldn’t play on my parents’ expensive stereo.

In my lifetime, recorded music went through several forms: the 78 rpm record (that’s revolutions per minute for those of you who have always wondered [and look at me, explaining something every kid knew, back in the dark ages]), the 45 rpm, the 33 rpm, the 8-track tape, the cassette tape, the CD, and now the MP3 digital download (which I greatly prefer).  In other words, ways to access recorded music have existed for more than a century, but those ways have always changed.  I know people who rebought their entire record collection when they went from vinyl to CD and are buying enough hardware to store their digital library (okay, that second part includes me).

None of this happened with the book. The book has been stable since Gutenberg.  Yes, there have been additional formats—the trade paper format, the mass market format—but they were still words, printed in ink, on paper, bound in some kind of material.

That kind of stability breeds faith.  If you love a book that you read digitally, you will buy the bound version so that you will always have a copy in a reliable format.

That makes it sound like bound book sales will go down.  But they won’t, because readership will increase as access increases.

Right now, only a small percentage of books get sold in actual bookstores.  Because I’m tired and a bit cranky from the long (and rather stressful) drive, I’m not going to look up the actual number.  But it’s surprisingly small.  Most people get their books while buying something else—groceries, diapers, newspapers.  The bulk of all books sold sell from places like grocery stores and Wal-Mart, not from Barnes & Noble.

Put that fact together with these two facts:  75% of all teenagers have cell phones.  Smart cell phones, like the iPhone, have several reading applications.  On my iPhone alone, I have three e-reading apps: Stanza, Kindle, and Borders.  I’d have more, but I keep forgetting to download the app.

Other statistics have shown that people who have fiction available on their smart phones read more books than they did before they carried a smart phone.  They now read like I do: in line at the bank, in the movie theater before the lights go down, as they wait for friends to meet them at a restaurant.  The only difference is this: I used to carry a book with me everywhere.  Most people didn’t.  Now I carry several books with me in my phone, and so do they.  When they get a minute, they read.  They no longer need designated reading time.

As more and more people read more and more books, the number of books sold will increase dramatically.  I know that I buy more books now that I own a Kindle than I did before—and I bought more than most people before.

Why am I buying more? Access.  In the past, if I read a review of a book that sounded interesting, I had to remember two things: I had to remember to write down the title and author, and I had to remember to bring that paper with me to the bookstore when I visited.  Since I might not remember the paper right away, I might miss my chance to buy that book in the store because a bookstore can only carry so much stock.  (See Dean’s blog on books as produce [which was my analogy before he stole it.])

When Amazon.com came into being, I still had to make the transition from the review source to looking up the book on Amazon and maybe ordering it or maybe not.

Now that I own a Kindle, I read the review (often on my Kindle), then click onto the bookstore, find the book (if it exists as an ebook), and download the free sample.  I don’t read the sample immediately, but when I do, I often download the entire book.  Or I go to my computer at that moment, and order the bound copy.  (The difference for me is this: I make margin notes in almost every nonfiction book I read, so I prefer a hardcopy.  I don’t like the notation system on the Kindle or the other ereaders that I’ve seen.  So I order bound copies of nonfiction, but generally order ebook versions of fiction.)

I am buying more books because I remember that I wanted to read them.  Anecdotal evidence shows that I’m not alone in this.  There’s another phenomenon that statistics are beginning to bear out, and again, anecdotal evidence shows that it skews young:  People who buy ebooks will often buy two copies of the same book for themselves—one bound copy as well as the ebook copy.  Sometimes they buy the bound book to have a permanent copy on the shelf, and sometimes they buy the bound book to read at home, and have the ebook copy to read on their phone or their ereader.

Also, statistics have shown that the number of people who read books grows each year, and has done so since the GI Bill in 1946.  Yes, I know, there was that one stupid Census “study” a few years ago that showed reading had decreased, but if you actually looked in the guts of the study, you realize that some “statistician” (and that’s in quotes because no real statistician would ever do this) looked at a decline in reading in 1000 households and extrapolated that data to show that reading declined in all of America.  For those of you who don’t understand statistics, let me simply say that 1000 households is so insignificant that it is closer to zero than it is to a recognizable percentage of the U.S. population.  In other words, it’s not something you can viably extrapolate over millions and millions of people.

So, if more and more people are reading, and they have greater access to books, then book sales will increase dramatically.  For the next ten years or so, books will be a significant growth industry.  But we will lose a lot of major publishing imprints and a lot of established publishing businesses. Why? See last week’s post, Fighting The Last War.  Most of established publishing doesn’t understand the upcoming change.  Many of those who do understand the change don’t know how to change their business model to capitalize on that change.

So smaller, more nimble companies will take advantage of the change.

For those of us who read, these changes will make no difference to our reading habits. We’ll still buy books for ourselves and friends. We’ll still discuss them and enjoy them and think about them.

For those of us who write, these changes will either be enriching or devastating depending on the way we view the world, how quickly we change, and whether or not we’re capable of adapting.  A lot of writers will see little or no change at all because they’ll continue to function in the old model—which will remain viable.

What most people don’t understand is that books aren’t changing, reading isn’t changing, and writing isn’t changing. But the delivery systems are changing.

Not very long ago, it used to be hard to get a book from writer to reader.  A writer could self-publish a book, at the cost of thousands of dollars, but still she wouldn’t be able to get the book into more than a few bookstores (if any).  Publishers put the book in physical form, then gave that form to their sales force. The sales force sold the book to actual distribution companies as well as to bookstores.  The distribution companies also sold to bookstores. But the distribution companies also sold to grocery stores and Wal-Mart and truck stops and all those off-market places, the places where people buy the most books.

The system was and is unwieldy.  Books are the only product that I know of where the producer takes all of the risk.  Unsold books can be returned to the publisher for full credit.  This returns system, instituted in the Great Depression to help bookstores stay alive, now costs the book industry millions of dollars.  For every book purchased, another book gets produced—and destroyed.  So built into the price of the book you buy is the price of an identical book that no one will read.

The returns were part of the business model, just like the difficulty of getting books into the distribution system was part of the model, just like the difficulty of getting new books noticed was part of the model.

With the personal computer, anyone could publish a book on their website, but that book would be hard to read.  Many people didn’t like to read an entire novel on their P.C.  No matter how hard innovators tried to change this, it didn’t work.

Then the ereader came along. The Kindle makes ereading easy. From the look of the other ereaders I’ve seen reading seems easy on those devices as well.

Ereaders are changing the distribution system.  Anyone can upload a novel to Kindle, and theoretically get to thousands if not millions of readers.  Same with other ebook devices.

The music industry went through the same distribution change with the advent of iTunes and other MP3 stores.  Now savvy musicians simultaneously release their new music in multiple formats—MP3, CD, and vinyl, as well as cassettes.  And the industry has changed accordingly.

In August, Taylor Swift’s latest single got leaked on the internet weeks ahead of the scheduled launch.  In the past, her music label would have sued the leaker (if he could be found) and any site that played the song.

Now all that the label did was scramble to officially release the song two weeks earlier than planned, so that people who heard it could buy an official copy.  The single leapt to Number One on iTunes within 36 hours.  Yet that excited Swift less than hearing the song played on the radio—the old-fashioned way of letting people know that the song exists.  The scheduled launch of the entire album is weeks away, but the new distribution systems make parts of it already available, which only seems to build excitement.

Such changes will—and are—happening in publishing now.  Things change by the week.  Some of those changes will occur in businesses other than publishing companies and writers.  The big distributors—Ingrams and Baker & Taylor, for example—will have to adjust to changes I can’t yet foresee.  Bookstores will need to scramble to become relevant.  They’ll need to find new ways to get readers into the stores to buy the books there.

I think Barnes & Noble is on the right track here with the Nook.  B&N offers Nook exclusives that you can only download when you’re in an actual store.  I’m sure that they’ll come up with other promotions as well, things that will keep the readers packed into the brick-and-mortar store at five o’clock on a hot Monday afternoon.

I am inspired by all these changes.  I knew about them before I left home on the aborted LA trip, but some of them didn’t sink in until I saw that constantly changing line of interested buyers at B&N in a small, relatively blue collar Oregon city late Monday afternoon.

This is an exciting new world for all of us touched by books.  If we can only keep up with the changes….

My business blog is one of those changes for me.  I would never have imagined doing this a year ago, and yet I enjoy writing each entry.  If I inspire you or make you think, click the donate button or make a comment.  I love hearing from you guys.  Topic suggestions always welcome.

“The Business Rusch: The Nook Inspiration” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The Business Rusch: Fighting The Last War

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Military historians have a saying:  Generals usually fight the last war.

What this means is simple: the generals running a new war make plans based on the previous war.  The concept actually makes sense.  Generals usually had a lower rank in the previous war.  They watched comrades die senselessly due to mistakes that should never have been made in the first place, and the generals vow to never make the same mistake as the leaders of the last war.

The problem is that as the generals are looking backwards, furiously defending themselves and their soldiers against the mistakes of the past,  the new war goes on around them.  The new war has its own priorities, its own set of problems, and its own mistakes. Often those mistakes result from fighting the last war.

How does all of this square with the concept of learning from your mistakes?  In the Freelancer’s Survival Guide, I constantly told you that my philosophy is to never make the same mistake twice.  It sounds like, from the military history perspective, the generals are attempting the same thing.

And they are. They’re making new mistakes, but often these generals miss the bigger picture—they miss that this war is different from the last. That’s where a visionary leader comes in.  The visionary leader can see the differences between this war and the last, and often knows what to do about those differences.

The problem is that visionary leaders and stable organizations, like the military, don’t mesh well.

In the comments for last week’s post, writer Carolyn Nicita attached a link to an article on The Daily Beast titled “Why I Fired Steve Jobs.” The article is interesting, although not nearly as dishy as I had hoped (so sue me; I like to read business gossip).  When looked at from a purely managerial perspective, John Sculley had no choice but to fire Jobs.  Jobs was arrogant, difficult, out of control, and refused to respect authority.  He was also brilliant and visionary.

A caveat here: I’m making assumptions based on my 25 year-old knowledge of the problem and the very short article Carolyn sent.  I do not want the comments section of my blog to turn into a religious discussion—no Apple versus Microsoft arguments, please, and no pro- or anti-Steve Jobs junk.  I’m going to use this article as a jumping-off point.  If some of the things I list below did indeed happen and I am unaware of it, pretend they didn’t happen for the sake of argument.

What is clear from the article is that Sculley didn’t see Jobs’s value to the company.  Instead, Sculley saw Jobs as a difficult employee, getting in the way of the smooth operation of the organization.  Had Sculley seen Jobs as a valuable employee, Sculley would have done everything he could to keep that difficult employee.  Sculley would have given Jobs warnings, talkings-to, sent him to those weird socialization classes that businesses offer.  Sculley might have taken the extreme step of assigning a handler, just to keep Jobs in line.

With the benefit of hindsight, Sculley’s move is boneheaded.  From the things Sculley knew at the time, the decision made perfect sense.

What did Sculley know at the time? He knew how to manage.  He came from Pepsi, where he had saved the company with a brilliant marketing campaign.  He was brought to Apple for the express purpose of taking those Pepsi skills and applying them to a company that couldn’t seem to get traction.

In other words, Sculley was hired to fight the last war in a brand new company.  And wow—surprise, surprise—it didn’t really work.

As one of the commenters after the article pointed out, Jobs has often said, “Management tends to be about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.”

Unfortunately, leaders can only inspire so long.  At some point, they need managers to help them get the troops to actually do the work.

Dean Wesley Smith and I learned this lesson the hard way at Pulphouse Publishing.  We’re both visionary.  We suck at people management.  I’m a little better than Dean if you look at it from one perspective: I don’t yell in the office.  I’m worse than Dean if you look at it from all other perspectives: I expect everyone to get the job done and to leave me alone.  At least Dean follows up.

We both knew we had this failing.  We hit a point in the business where we needed a competent business manager to take us to the next level.  We had a good manager for a small company, but we needed someone on a much larger scale, with the ability to run an international corporation.  Unfortunately, the people we knew who could do this would have to be hired away from some other company—and we couldn’t afford that salary.  Heck, we couldn’t afford to hire a head hunter to look for someone who might fit the bill.

Many small companies get stuck in this place.  Even more react like Apple—they hire someone unsuited, because they’re fighting the last war.  They think they know what they need based on what happened before, but in reality they have no idea what the future will bring.

The solution I always wanted for Pulphouse, one we could never achieve, was the one depicted in the movie Big.  Tom Hanks’s 13-year-old boy, magically grown up, got a job at a toy company where they gave him his own office, let him play with toys, and come up with “ah, cool!” ideas.  Then the company, without question, would implement the ideas.

If all businesses worked like that—the true visionaries in their offices, playing with their toys, while the managers implemented the ideas efficiently and accurately—no company would ever fail.

Of course, I can’t think of a single company that works like that.  Not even Apple, no matter how much the press wants us to think so.

Most of us run small businesses and we scramble to keep our heads above water.  We often don’t have time to think about the last war let alone the current war.  We’re trying to make our rent and get through the day.  We reflexively fight the last war, because it takes little thought.  We analyze the mistakes we made, figure out how not to repeat them, then  move on.

But what we really need to do is lift our heads up as often as possible and look at the world around us.  We need to realize that the war going on around us is a new war.  We have to see with clear eyes whenever we look.

I know that’s hard.  Most people can’t see what’s going on around them—or if they can see it, they don’t understand it.  People can’t just have an understanding of the past and a knowledge of the present.

They also need to be able to extrapolate into the future.  The if-this-goes-on thinking that most good science fiction writers have needs to exist in business as well.  It’s this kind of thinking that puts “visionary” into the business world.

Not every person can be a visionary.  Some far-sighted people hire visionaries, not to develop  product, but to understand what kind of product is needed.  And the visionary has to understand the industry.  Futurist seminars are good to explore the overall culture, but would they  have helped Sculley with Jobs? No.  Hardly anyone saw the direction the tech industry would take in the ten years between 1985 and 1995.  Those who did see it often didn’t know how to capitalize on it.

As you can tell, I’m thinking about this a lot right now as my industry—the publishing industry—changes. The changes occur almost daily, and are sweeping in scope.  What will happen in the future? I don’t know.

I do know that Big Publishers are still fighting the last war—looking at e-books as an annoyance that could get in the way of their profits, rather than seeing how to profit from them.  It would be easy for me, as a writer, to do the same.  Instead, when I received the opportunity to put my entire backlist into e-books, I jumped at the  chance.

Will it benefit me? I hope so.  Will it matter ten years from now? I hope so.  Will I look visionary twenty years from now? I hope so.

But do I know? Of course not.  Anymore than I understood the importance of blogging 18 months ago. But I am willing to be flexible.

What disturbs me the most about this “fighting the last war” phenomenon is that it doesn’t just happen in the military or in business, but in other areas as well. As I listen to stockbrokers and economists talk about fighting inflation, I’m acutely aware of the fact that the average interest rate on a 30-year-fixed mortgage in 1981 was about 17%.  The average interest rate on a 30-year-fixed mortgage today is about 5%.  The problem, at the moment, isn’t inflation.  The problem is that the United States has lost its manufacturing base.  We don’t make anything in this country any longer.  Our economy is based on consumers spending dollars rather than Americans making product that we are selling to ourselves and overseas.

But are the people in charge of our financial system discussing this? Behind closed doors, I hope.  But I doubt it.  The economists and stockbrokers, the heads of the various Federal Reserve Banks, are all discussing inflation, as if it were a greater threat to our economy than joblessness is.  And that’s simply myopic.

Those of us who run small businesses have created something.  We’ve created a store or a law firm, music or artwork, buildings or building materials.  We understand the difficulties of inflation—borrowing money becomes difficult, for one thing. But no one can borrow money right now anyway.  All the big banks and lending firms are waiting for the other economic shoe to drop.  So inflation—to those of us who run small businesses—is somewhat irrelevant.  In fact, those of us with money in the bank would like to see interest rates rise a little.  Then we would make money on the money we have in reserve.

That’s just an example of the last war having an impact on all of us.  As I stare down the new face of publishing, I try to analyze my own attitudes.  Am I looking at it from an old-fashioned, out-of-date position, or am I using the past to understand the present? Am I dreaming of a better future while ignoring the signs of upcoming disaster? Am I being realistic?

Unfortunately, in the terms of future predictions, only time will tell.  The problem with being human is that we cannot know the future.  (Sometimes, I would argue, we don’t know the past either.)  We have to make educated guesses on where the future will go, and what it will bring.  Those guesses should be based on knowledge without fear, on not making the same mistakes but on being unafraid of making new ones.

And honestly, that’s a tall order.

Not all of us can do it.  But those of us who can will thrive in the changing environments we face, instead of being tossed around by events.

Running a business isn’t easy, no matter what the business.  In fact, it’s fraught with all kinds of perils.  Never make the same mistake twice.  But remember that fighting the last war is a common business mistake.  When you’re reviewing the past, make sure it doesn’t hold you—and that the war you’re fighting happens to be the one you’re in the middle of now, not the one you survived in the past.

Thanks for all the great letters and comments last week supporting the new column/blog.  I’m going to keep the donate button here.  If you feel so inclined, leave me a dollar or two to carry me to the next installment.

“The Business Rusch: “Fighting The Last War” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The Business Rusch: Creative Destruction

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here it is: the Business Blog which, thanks to Marina Nelson, is called “The Business Rusch.”  I like the title for a couple of reasons.  First, I’ve had to live with the puns people make from my last name since I was a kid.  I was in high school in the 1970s when the slang phrase, “What a rush!” was in vogue.  You can imagine how often I heard that, and not always in an admiring tone.

In some ways, my last name is appropriate.  All my life, I’ve been in a hurry.  No one has ever called me patient, not even by mistake.  Once I’ve learned something, I’m ready to move on—even if no one else in the room understands it.  Once I know I’m on the right path, I hurry along, trying to get as far forward as I can before I collapse.

I’m the obnoxious kid who finished her homework early—not because I was a suck-up or even efficient, but because I thought about the assignment when I got it, finished it, and moved onto the next thing.  I spent the first week of my 11^th grade English class reading the textbook, and the rest of the year reading whatever I wanted.  And that was—and is—typical for me.

The other reason the title “The Business Rusch” appeals to me is that modern business zooms by.  It rushes from one thing to the next, headlong, heedless of the results.  That’s how we got into the mortgage mess, which led us into the Great Recession, and I suspect that’s how we’ll get out.

Changes are happening in my business—publishing—that are so rapid that things which were true in May, when I finished my most recent paranormal romance novel, aren’t true now as I finish my latest science fiction novel.

As I mentioned last week, this blog will be discussing all kinds of business, not just publishing, not just freelancing, but whatever catches my eye.  Before I became a fulltime fiction writer, I was a fulltime nonfiction writer, specializing in business.

My business specialty came because business publications, then and now, need a lot of copy from business literate writers and those of you who regularly read my freelancers guide know this sad truth:  there are very few business literate writers. Even the reporters who get assigned to the Business Desk at major newspapers often do not understand how business works.

I understand it.  I’ve owned a lot of small businesses and still run a few.  I also love business, like I love history, like I love news.  At its heart, business is about human interaction.  Businesses succeed and fail because of the human beings in charge.  You put the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time and even the most successful businesses will fail.

How does that go with rushing to get ahead?  Sometimes my desire to hurry is counterintuitive to good business decisions, and sometimes hurrying is just what the doctor ordered.  I couldn’t have written this type of column in my twenties because I didn’t know when to slow down and examine things.  I didn’t understand the importance of it.

I learned that lesson repeatedly in the School of Hard Knocks.

So I’m going to share that knowledge, along with when I believe rushing forward is important and when research, caution, and yes, patience, are the watchwords of the day.  This column will only occasionally have the structure of the Freelancer’s Guide.  I want to keep my options open so that I can examine current events or whatever is on my mind any given week.

Speaking of the Freelancer’s Guide, I’m organizing all 140,000 words now, and releasing short segments as stand-alone books, for those of you who only want one or two topics, not the whole thing.  You can find links to this week’s short book, Turning Setbacks into Opportunity, at the end of this column.  For the next few weeks, I’ll also list this blog under the Freelancer’s Guide so that those of you who have the Freelancer’s Guide on your RSS feed will get the blog.  If you’re interested in getting the blog, I suggest you add the Business Rusch to your RSS feed, since I’ll only do this two or three times.

I’m looking forward to the freedom of this column. The Freelancer’s Guide had a narrow focus: freelancing and freelance businesses.  But right now, business—heck, the entire economy—is going through a huge shift.  In talking about publishing this past weekend, writer Scott William Carter said he felt like he was going through a paradigm shift in the middle of another paradigm shift.  He was talking about the digital revolution smacking into publishing and forcing an industry that has followed the same model for decades to confront rapid and somewhat startling change.

Thirty years ago, my ex husband saw the beginnings of the video revolution and said to me, “If we had extra money, I’d open a storefront and rent videotapes to people.”  We discussed this as a business model for about three days, seeing all kinds of problems with it.  At the time, video cassettes sold for a lot of money (my memory says $60-$80, but I’m not sure if that’s right).  The industry hadn’t yet chosen a format, whether it be VHS or Betamax.  Most people did not own video cassette recorders, because they cost hundreds of dollars.

So my ex and I decided there were too many variables: what if we backed the wrong format? How would we keep people from stealing the expensive video cassettes?  Were there even enough people to keep us in business?

Obviously there were.  By the time I met my current husband, Dean Wesley Smith, in 1986, video stores had cropped up all over the country.  Four years later, Blockbuster had opened chain stores everywhere.  I remember reading about Blockbuster busting the competition in the business section of the paper.  It was quite dramatic here in Oregon because the owner of Hollywood Video, which was a competitor, staged a pitched and ugly battle with Blockbuster, and the papers covered it with great glee.

But had my ex and I started that video store business thirty years ago, we’d have spent the last ten years struggling.  Change came again to the industry, and this time, places like Blockbuster didn’t know how to respond.

In July, the New York Stock Exchange delisted Blockbuster, and its stock trades at about 17 cents per share.  Blockbuster has not survived yet another revolution, one Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter calls “creative destruction.”

In creative destruction, innovative companies succeed while slower moving, often established companies do not.  My husband likens the transitions to piloting a ship.  If you’re piloting one of those floating cities we call cruise ships, turning it from its set course is extremely difficult.  Cruise ships do not turn on a dime.  They move slowly, and with deliberation, and no matter how quickly you want them to turn, you can’t speed up the process.

Smaller companies—yachts or better yet, cigarette boats—can turn quickly.  They can skim the waves of change and move into uncharted waters with ease.

Not all small companies survive creative destruction, and creative destruction does not capsize all large companies.  Some companies build response to change into their business plan.  Sunday’s New York Times profiled Netflix, which planned for the demise of its original business model as it started the business.  The owners of Netflix saw that DVDs through the mail was a short-term model, just like the video stores were a short term model.  The founders of Netflix thought the web was the next big thing (hence Netflix, not Mailflix), and sketched the business model with that in mind.

Are they planning for the next big thing after streaming video?  Only they know for sure.

Netflix’s advantage, even as it grew, was that it was a young company.  It foresaw the change, and could act upon it.  But two other industries, the music industry and the publishing industry, are much older, bigger, and have a lot more difficulty with change.

The music industry had its initial growth spurt over 100 years ago.  In one of Dean’s piles of collectibles, we have piles of sheet music which acted as the singles of their day.  The art is lovely, the music is still playable, and to collectors, the sheet music has value.

Even though there’s still a sheet music industry, it has shrunk to the point of being a niche market.  It exists for schools and for people who play/perform music.  Like everything else, sheet music has moved to the web and for a miniscule price, you can download sheet music for most titles from the past three hundred years.

But no one thinks of the sheet music industry as the “music industry.”  When we think of the music industry, we think of the big studios, once called record companies.  For decades—literally decades—these companies had a stranglehold over the music we listened to.  The companies controlled the distribution.  A small recording studio like Sun Studios could get its music played regionally, but it took the behemoth RCA to make Elvis Presley a nationwide sensation.

If an artist wanted to make millions, he had to give up millions to his distributor—the record label.  Musicians could tour; they could play bars and concert halls, but they couldn’t gain a huge audience without the backing of a label.

That situation remained the same from the 1920s until the mid-1990s. Sure, the industry went through an upheaval as CDs replaced vinyl. But the big upheaval was still to come—the MP3 player.

As the industry changed, I kept hearing that the music industry was dying. At the same time, my indie musician friends had suddenly started to make a real living—and by that I mean a living off their music.  Five-to-six figures per year, where they’d been making a thousand to two thousand before.

That gave me cognitive dissonance. How could the industry be dying and yet my musician friends were making more money than ever?  I sort-of paid attention, but didn’t really think about it.

Until the same sea-change hit publishing.  Now we’re hearing that the publishing industry is dying, yet midlist writers—the indie musicians of the publishing industry—can make a huge living for the first time in their careers.

What’s true?

Weirdly, both things.

The big publishing companies, like the big music studios, are cruise ships.  Some of them can’t turn fast enough to take advantage of the changes coming through e-readers and constantly available literature.  At the same time, midlist authors, whose early books went out of print, are the cigarette boats of the publishing industry.  We can move so fast that no one will even see us coming.

Some cigarette boats will get lost in uncharted waters, but those of us with some business savvy see opportunity here.  Like the indie musicians whose fans fund the next album, midlist writers can write books without a publisher’s backing and have a similar result.

Or so it seems.

Right now, we’re in the middle of the creative destruction.  Some—like Michael A. Stackpole—believe the publishing industry (the big guys) will suffer their largest shake-out by Christmas of 2012.  Me, I think we’re going to watch a long slow decline, and we’ll lose some publishers along the way.

The ones who can’t turn their ships fast enough will be the Hollywood Videos of the industry—the ones we’ll go, “Oh, yeah, I remember them.” Some of the publishers will become as marginal as Blockbuster. Some are doing everything they can to move quickly.  They’ve seen the changes coming for more than a decade, and have some things in place already.  Whether they have the right measures in place remains to be seen.

Does this mean publishing will go away?  No.  No more than music did.  We consume more music as a culture than we did twenty-five years ago, and the artists who understand that are making a good living.  I recently downloaded music from a group I’d never heard of, who plays only in Australia.  (If you like comics, check out Tripod)  I would never have contributed to their bottom line in 1985, if I had even heard of them.  I would have had to have Australian friends who could find the CD and then ship it to me—if, indeed, they could even find the CD.

Now, I can hear about the group from a friend, hop over to my favorite digital music site, and download as many songs as I can find.  (Which I did, by the way.)

This is just starting to happen with books—and the shake-out will be similar.  The fleet of foot will make money in this change, but the larger industry will suffer greatly.  Dean will be dealing with this a lot in his blog, The New World of Publishing.  I’ll touch on it occasionally.

I’m more fascinated with the little guy twisting in the center of all these trends.  The declining economy is good for book sales; people stay home and read. Books are cheap entertainment.  But the publishing industry has overpriced books, so new books will suffer. They already are; publishers aren’t buying as many new books as they should.  So if new books are costly, the book consumer will turn to other venues—used bookstores, libraries, and cheap downloads.

Dorchester already saw this.  They have been a marginal company for years. Writers have had to push to get payments for some time now, always the sign of a company in trouble. Rather than go bankrupt, Dorchester has moved entirely to e-publishing, and has done it almost overnight.  The nice thing about e-publishing? Small overhead costs.

Only time will tell if Dorchester’s move will save the company, but clearly no move at all would have led to the company’s destruction.

So you and me—the little guys—what do we do in times of creative destruction?  We research.  We guess.  We stay nimble.  We try things.  We keep open minds.

Recently, as the Dorchester made its sudden change and startling announcement, bloggers cried foul. Writers had already invested money in promoting their books (!), and were now worried that all the money they invested was for naught.  Never mind that writers investing in promotion never ever helps a book’s bottom line.  The writers claimed they were screwed by Dorchester.

But here’s the thing: the writers signed a contract with Dorchester.  If Dorchester violated that contract, then the writers can pull their books.  But, I’m pretty sure that Dorchester didn’t violate any contract at all.  I’m sure the company’s attorney checked that.

So what’s a writer to do?  Look at the clauses that allow the writer to cancel the contract. Depending on the contract itself, writers can cancel for a variety of reasons—so long as they repay the advance.  If writers are really upset by this, they can repay the loan that the advance is and “buy” their book back.

But too many writers are afraid to do that.

And fear is the biggest problem in this time of change.  Because fear will keep you rooted to the same spot.  You won’t be a cruise ship or a cigarette boat.  You’ll be a buoy in the middle of the ocean, buffeted by waves, insignificant, forgotten, and ultimately, you’ll sink.

So what do I recommend? What I always recommend.  Research. Figure out your place in the marketplace. Figure out what you want from your career.  Then figure out how to turn your boat—if, indeed, it needs turning.

Right now, most business owners should reassess their position in this economy.  I don’t think any business—great or small, manufacturing or artistic, distribution or service—should assume things are going to remain the same. The changes to the economy itself are too great.  Add the technological revolution that’s happening in many industries (not just the arts), and you have the makings of a great economic upheaval.

Time to look at the future.  Time to figure out your place in it.  Time to figure out how to get there.

I’m scrambling.  Part of this blog will simply be me, thinking aloud as I figure out where I’m going.  I hope it will help you figure out at least part of your future as well.

I decided I’m putting a donate button here.  If I inspire you, get you to forward the link to friends, or make you think, drop a few bucks in the tip jar.  Thanks!

“The Business Rusch: Creative Destruction” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Here’s the newest Freelancers Guide Short Book:

Kindle, Scribd, Smashwords

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: The Great Experiment

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“This post marks the beginning of an experiment.”

That’s how I started the Freelancer’s Survival Guide, back in April of 2009.  The experiment was mine; I had no idea how well writing a book chapter by chapter on my website would work—or if it would work at all.

As I mentioned a few times, my friend Michael J. Totten has made a good living from his blog.  But Michael travels to the Middle East and reports from there, doing the kind of journalism most media outlets can’t afford to do any longer.  His readers appreciate what he’s doing and fund his travels, so that they can get the news they crave from a part of the world still undercovered in the United States.

When I spoke to Michael about writing my Guide, I knew I wouldn’t attract the readership he has;  I wasn’t providing the timely and necessary service that he is.  He convinced me to add the donate button.  I thought it wouldn’t be used.  I was wrong.

I was wrong about many things.  I figured the blog itself and the weekly deadline would keep me honest.  I would finally finish the book that I had planned to write for years. Then I would market it, and some publisher would buy it, put it in the stores at a relatively small level, and that would be that.

What a difference fifteen months makes.

Here’s what I was right about:

I finished the book I had planned to write for years.  The deadline did keep me honest, although at times it felt like a high-wire act performed in public without a net.

That’s it.  I was right about nothing else.

I haven’t yet crunched all the numbers.  In addition to finishing the Freelancer’s Guide just last week, I am finishing a major novel.  I have a revision due on another novel.  I also had to write an essay that required a great deal of research for a textbook, and finish my bimonthly column.  Not to mention a bunch of work I must do for the publisher who is putting my entire backlist online.  And I almost forgot the three e-mail interviews (time-consuming), and some research for the novel after the two I’m finishing.

Which is all a long way of saying that I had no time for number crunching of the serious variety.  I’m organizing the Guide—I got one section in order in the middle of the weekend.  Two other sections are online now, so you can order them separately if you have need of those topics (see below).  I’m still on track to get the Guide out to everyone who donated before I leave for Germany in the middle of September.  Barring unforeseen circumstances, I should barely make that self-imposed deadline.

When I do that, I will have finished the number-crunching, so that I know who donated more than once, and via different e-mail accounts, and so on.

Right now, my numbers are a bit vague.

Here’s what I do know:  People from more than 25 countries read the Guide every week.  Most of the readers came from the United States, followed by Canada and England.  Quite a few came from France and Japan, with Australia coming in sixth.  After that, it depended on the month as to which countries brought me the most readers.

The Guide was, by far, the most read item on my website.  People didn’t stop at one post, either. They caught up on past posts.  (Guess I’d better update the last of the table of contents.)  Once they discovered the Guide, many people began at the beginning and read post after post.

I got a tremendous number of private letters, more than I can count, commenting on everything from personal responses to my posts to locating a few mathematical errors (thanks!).  I learned that posts about money made everyone shut up except me.  (I love to talk money.)  I learned that posts about emotions inspired the most personal letters, often recounting personal stories which I, in turn, found inspiring.

My big fear as I started up the blog was opening it to comments.  I’ve written columns electronically for more than a decade now, and my experience with comments has—up until the Guide—been primarily negative.  Several people on the net seemed out to prove just how stupid I was or how I couldn’t know what I was talking about.  Even more attacked me personally.

I didn’t want that to happen on my blog.  I asked several people how they managed comments on their blogs.  Most people had never had the problems I had with negative comments on their own blogs.  A few writers had, and they suggested that I moderate the comments, simply preventing the negative comments from getting through.

I sighed and agreed, not wanting to admit that I wasn’t worried about other people reading hateful things about me.  I didn’t want to go to my internet computer every morning and get told what a horrible person I was.  In short, I was more worried about my reaction to the negative post than I was about other peoples’ reactions.  But I manned up, and took the risk.

And never once got a nasty comment.  Not one.  No hate mail, none of those vile comments I had gotten as recently as two years ago on my columns for online publications.  Thank you for that.  I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the civility that you’ve all shown on my site.

The discussions were lively as well, livelier than I expected, although they never reached the depth and breadth of comment that my husband, Dean Wesley Smith, gets on his Killing The Sacred Cows of Publishing blog.  I think that has more to do with content than anything. Dean is destroying myths.  I’ve been providing information.  Information is a lot less controversial than using facts to skewer assumptions.

Finally, the donate button.  I had hoped that I would get a few hundred dollars so that I didn’t feel like I was wasting valuable  writing time, time that I would have normally been paid for.  If I had gotten no donations, I figured I could use the first three chapters of the Guide, add a proposal and attempt to sell the thing to New York, getting money nine months in or so.

Well, a couple things thwarted that plan. First, I write out of order. Aways have, always will.  I would have had to wait until six or eight weeks in before I had the right kind of material to show to a publisher. By that point, I had enough donations to pay a small advance.

Most advances from modern publishing come this way: half on signing of the contract and half on acceptance.  The small advance you folks paid me came in long before I would have gotten any money from New York.  The money trickled in during the entire time I wrote the Guide instead of in lump sums, which was nice as well.  By the time I finished, I had a full advance for a non-bestselling nonfiction book.  That’s about six months earlier than I would have received any money had a major publisher purchased the book four months into my writing process.

No major publisher has purchased the book because I haven’t mailed it to any of them.  Midway through writing, I realized the book would be larger than most publishers could comfortably handle.  I also decided that I would rather publish it myself, not just in e-book format, but in a print edition as well.

I wanted all of the information in the book, not just the topics some publisher felt should be in there.  The topics would be chosen by them, not because the others were unimportant, but because we would have to cut something to bring down the cost of production.

I also wanted the freedom to update the volume whenever I felt like it.  Working electronically and via a print-on-demand service, I could update the book each week if I wanted to.  That flexibility is important, because there are big changes coming, not just in publishing, but in many areas.  Already the piece I wrote on insurance is somewhat out of date.  That bit will change annually until 2014, when (theoretically), all of the provisions of the new U.S. health care law will kick in.

Then there’s the fact that I’m constantly learning.  I’ll probably be dissatisfied with the advice I gave in some section as I learn more about the topic or the information I have gets updated.  I wanted the flexibility to alter that as well.

Finally, I realized during one of my posts marked “Part five” that some of the sections were long enough to be minibooks on a particular topic.  I could try to convince some publisher to do the minibook or I could do it myself.  I’ve already started that process, with the two below.

The minibooks are for people like me, people who don’t want 140,000 words of some how-to book when they only really need 30,000 words on one of the topics covered in the table of contents.  The longer book will have every topic; the shorter ones will only have the topics that lend themselves to more than one post.

What has changed the most since April of 2009, however, is me.  I am much more comfortable working online.  I’m happy with doing my own electronic editions.  I’m exciting about bringing back my rusty publishing skills to get the book out in print editions.  I’ve also embraced my inner nonfiction writer.  I didn’t quite abandon her when I gave up my nonfiction career to focus on fiction.  I continued to dabble.  But I missed the opportunity to stretch my nonfiction wings more than I wanted to admit.

I declare the experiment officially over. Not only that, I declare it a success.  Although, to me, success seems like an awfully small word for the changes doing the Freelancer’s Guide has brought to me.

It’s developed a community.  It’s put me in touch with old friends and helped me make some new ones.  It forced me to formalize my own thoughts and opinions about various topics.  It showed me the freedom of online publishing.  It also brought in readers who would never have come to my site otherwise, people who don’t read fiction, people outside my insular genre fiction universe.

Thank you all for participating.  It’s meant a lot to me.

As I came to the end of the weekly portion of the Guide, I had mixed feelings.  I wanted to be done, like I always do on any book that I write.  I wanted to have my Wednesdays back.  I disliked the deadline, but I loved it as well.  The Guide made me more productive.  I found that on the days when my health problems make it hard for me to write fiction, I could generally work on the Guide.  I hadn’t missed my deadline, so if I was going to be out of town or teaching, I figured out a way to rearrange my schedule so that I could get the Guide done.  (I even got up four hours early one morning to finish, which is more serious than you realize, considering how allergic I am to mornings.)

The closer I got to finishing the Guide, the more I realized I didn’t want to give up my weekly nonfiction work.  I like the interaction.  I like exercising different writing muscles.  I even like the deadline, although I complain about it.

A number of you wondered what you would read on Thursdays now that the Guide is done.  I had been wondering that for a while. And in that jigsaw puzzle way my brain works, it doled out the answer when it was good and ready—last Thursday, after I had put up the last Guide column.

Starting next week, I’m going to write a weekly business blog.  It won’t be as focused as the Guide, although there might be a stretch of weeks on the same topic.  The reason I decided on business is this: it allows me to talk about a variety of things, from the latest publishing news to importance of this week’s manufacturing numbers, things that don’t fall into a narrow topic defined by a book.

Part of the blog will be an interactive feature called Ask the Freelancer.  If you have a question about freelancing, ask me, give me permission to use your letter, and I’ll respond on the site.  If you don’t want your name added, use a signoff like you might find in an advice column: Wondering in Wichita or something like that.  I’ll make sure to use it.

The Ask The Freelancer part will occur as often as I have letters.  If I don’t, I won’t use that feature.

I’ll also use the business blog to post the updated Freelancer’s Guide articles, the ones that have changed since the original post.

I have a variety of other ideas as well, but those are the ones I can put into words right now.  The one thing I don’t have is a good name for the blog.  I’d like it to be plain like “The Business Blog” but I’m certain—without even doing a Google search—that there are hundreds of those.  So if you have any ideas, feel free to send them along.

Installment one of the Unnamed Business Blog is next Thursday.  We’ll continue with our discussions.

Again, thanks for the help with my great experiment.  I know a number of you have said that the Freelancer’s Guide made a difference in your lives.  It certainly has made a difference in mine—and it couldn’t have happened without y’all.

As promised, here are the two sections of the Guide already in ebook format.  I’ll let you know each time we publish more sections of the Guide. The books will be available in all e-formats, however it takes a while to get to some of the sites.  If you can’t find what you’re looking for on your favorite site, go to Smashwords and download there.

Kindle, Scribd, Smashwords

Kindle, Scribd, Smashwords

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: The Benefits of Freelancing

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Several years ago, my career hit a serious downtown, the kind most careers never recover from.  I made a series of bad business decisions, including hiring two terrible employees who did everything they could to gut my business.  I compounded the initial mistakes by making more mistakes.  On top of that, my health collapsed.  I was ill twenty days out of every month, incapacitated for at least ten of those days.  In the middle of all of that, I hit my mid-life crisis.  Don’t let anyone tell you a mid-life crisis only hits men.  It hits women too.

During those dark days, I kept threatening to give up the writing.  Now, you have to understand what this means.  Giving up writing—for me—is like giving up breathing.  I sometimes say that I, the daughter of two alcoholics, am an addict too, only I’m addicted to writing.  If I don’t write, I go through withdrawals.  This, by the way, is not a joke.  If I am in a particularly bad mood, my husband will tell me to go write something.  If I take his advice (and I don’t always), I feel much better.

So for me to say that I was going to give up writing—and more importantly, to mean it—meant that something was seriously, seriously wrong.  I felt like I was at the bottom of a very deep pit, and I couldn’t figure out a way to climb out, so I simply decided to give up.

Or I would have, if I had an answer to the very reasonable question my brilliant husband would ask me whenever I brought up quitting.

What else would you do?

I had a list that I worked my way down.  At this time, our local radio station needed a news director.  I was overqualified for the position, so before I applied, I investigated.

The job paid one-third of what I earned during those bad years if and only if you added in the costs of the benefit package—a measly health insurance policy not as good as the one I had as a freelancer, and two weeks paid vacation.  To earn one-third of what I was doing, I would have to commit 40 hours per week (and occasional weekends, if there was a news story) to the radio station.  I would have set hours.

I would work for someone else.

In fact, every job on my list—from waiting tables (yes, waiting tables looked good to me then) to going back to editing—required me to work for someone else.  On their schedule.  With no hope for an increase in pay, except at the once a year or once every two year performance review, and then the increase would be rather small (by my freelancing standards).

The only job I came up with that even marginally approached my freelance lifestyle (but not my freelance income) was teaching at a university.  In order to do that, I would have to go back to school, get a masters degree, and get a Ph.D.  Not so bad. Sometimes I miss living in a college town.

But to get my degree(s) would cost money. I would have had to uproot my husband (and my cats), move to a part of the country with infinitely worse weather than the Oregon Coast, and – oh, yeah—be on someone else’s schedule.

Worse than that, when I graduated, tens of thousands of hard-earned dollars later, I’d be at the bottom of someone else’s totem pole, at the bottom of the pay bracket which was at that point (again) one-third of what I was earning in the bad years, and oh, yeah, I’d be working for someone else.  Deeper in debt, no promise of job security (not as a first-year professor), and no real way to earn my way out of it all quickly.

I could have opened another small business (which required a capital outlay—and oh, yeah—it would have to be something else I loved. Since I’ve only had one job I loved for longer than one year (writing), I doubted the new business route worked for me).  My husband even offered me the option  of loafing for two or three years while he supported me.  (Bless him.)  I know that was a serious offer, but I also know he understands me very well.  He knows that after two days of vacation or two days of “doing what I want”—basically two days  of not writing—I’m absolutely miserable.  He made the offer, but he knew the chances of me actually succeeding at lying on the couch, eating bon-bons and reading all day were between slim and none.  I get cranky when I have a week’s worth of research reading and no time to write.  Imagine how I’d feel if I had years to do that.

Okay, some of this is my personal pathology.  I’m really not wired to do anything else.  But beneath that was an honest, desperate search for solutions by a woman who had hit bottom.  I really saw no way to revive my career.  I had given up.  But I didn’t want to do anything else—or nothing else.

I didn’t have blinding revelation.  I didn’t have a life-changing insight.  I realized slowly and over time that I was doing what I loved, that things had gotten bleak, and I had to rebuild.  I found a doctor who helped me live with the health problems, taking my bad days down from 20 per month to seven or so, and taking my worst days down to a maximum of four per month.  (This sounds so easy.  It took two years of experimentation and work.)

I fired the last bad employee, dug in and figured out what damage he had done, and started to repair it.  Then I slowly rebuilt my career, examining every single part of it, figuring out what I wanted to keep and what I didn’t, and figuring out where I wanted to go in the future, and designing a path to get there.

Slowly—and I do mean slowly—I climbed out of that horrible deep dark pit.  What kept me on that climb was not the goal, or even the ability to work hard.  It was a daily reminder—sometimes by listening to the new news director on the local radio station, sometimes by watching the waiters at the local restaurant, sometimes by simply reviewing the options of other jobs (or plain old slacking) and realizing (again) how unsuited I am to all of those.

Unsuited really isn’t the right word.  If I had to, I could have done any one of those things.  The real key was, deep down, I didn’t want to.

I didn’t want to give up my freelance lifestyle.

I’ve been an on-again, off-again freelancer for thirty years.  Every time I got a real job, I came screaming back to the freelance life. The longest fulltime job I ever held lasted three months.  Even the news directorship, which I had for years, was intermittent.  I was always acting news director, stepping aside when a new, permanent news director came on board.  (Of course, they lasted only a few months, so I’d get the position again.)

What do I like about freelancing?  Just about everything.  The pros, the cons, the ups, the downs, everything that I’ve mentioned in this guide, I’ve not only experienced, but I prefer to working a day job.  I’ve tried very hard in this guide to keep a measured tone about day jobs because I intellectually understand their necessity.  I know why people have them, why people believe that a day job gives them security, and why they would want such a thing.  And if I had had children in my twenties, I would have followed a different life path. I would have gotten a day job, and hated every minute of it, and done it for the security, for my dependents.

But I have no dependents.  Dean is a co-equal partner with me in our various businesses (yes, we have more than two), and he likes the risks as much as I do.  As I’ve said before, we really don’t see them as risks.  We don’t take risks.  We make educated choices based on all of the knowledge available to us.  That we chose to do so without the “safety” and “security” of a large corporation behind us shows our questioning natures from an early age, not any great wisdom or stupidity.  As I said in the day job sections of this guide, I have never believed, even when I was in my teens, that any job was secure.  I’d seen too many people lose theirs, too many people fired for no apparent reason.

And when I was seven, I watched my dad lose his tenured college position in part because he had the courage to speak his mind. (A long story, one someone [not me] wrote a book about, but suffice to say that you can’t have tenure at a college that ceases to exist, and you can’t easily get a job at another college when you’re known as a whistleblower.)

These things—tragedies, really—helped me become a freelancer. I didn’t have to jump over as many mental hurdles as some of my freelancing colleagues when they started.

But risk taker or not, traditionally security minded or not, all freelancers face the same problems and have the same benefits.  I’m sure every single freelancer you talk to will have a different list of benefits for doing the work, but here are mine:

1. I work for myself. I set my hours.  I decide what I’m going to do every day.  Through the work I chose to do, I set my income levels.  Sometimes I turn down boring high-paying projects.  Sometimes I take a high-paying crappy project because I need the money.  I make the decision.  I don’t get assigned that project by someone else.

2. I do what I love. Yeah, yeah.  If you read the entire Guide, you know there are parts of freelancing that I loathe. But I do those things—well, not exactly happily, but not unhappily either.  Because I’m doing them in service of the work I love.  Without those things, I could not do what I do.  They make the rest of what I do worthwhile.

3. I never complain about going to the office. I’m happy to go to work, even if I’m not enjoying the process.  I found it fascinating that when I first opened the Guide to questions, the first questions I got were about taking time off.  I had to ask other professionals how they take vacations because I don’t take one.

Many freelancers don’t.  Why?

Simple.  The work we do now was the thing we did for fun in our free time.  Why take time off from something you love?  (Yes, yes, I know. Rest and all that.  I do rest.  But I don’t see why I need a vacation from something I would do on vacation if I had a day job.  That makes no sense to me at all.)

The idea of time off—and time off as part of a job description—comes from having jobs that you don’t like, jobs you only do for the money. And if that’s the only reason you’re freelancing, friend, then go out and get a day job.  Freelancing’s too hard to do if you don’t love the work.

4. I get to design my own workspace.  I almost wrote that I get to work at home, but I’ve had businesses where I didn’t work at home. Even then, I designed a Kris-style work environment, one suited just to me.

5. I am a creator.  I can’t tell you how important that is.  The economy survives based on how many creators it has.  Those of us who develop our own product and our own businesses don’t just create that product. We also create jobs. In addition to the people I hire, like the house cleaner and gardener I mentioned in the employees section of the guide, there are also the people I keep employed, people whose businesses I frequent with the money I bring into my local community.  From the grocery store to restaurants, from the local bookstore to the clothing stores, the money I spend here doesn’t come from here.  It comes from all over the world, and it helps to fuel the economy in my small town.

6. I am responsible for my own career.  In other words, if I succeed, I succeed because of what I do.  If I fail, I fail because of what I do.  I mentioned the two bad employees in my first paragraph above, and if you read only that paragraph, you might think I blame them for the downturn in my business.  I could, I suppose.  A lot of people would.

But I’m the one who hired them, I’m the one who trusted them to do their jobs with minimal oversight, and I’m the one who didn’t fire them soon enough.  In other words, they caused a lot of damage that would never have happened if I had acted promptly.  Their mistakes are my fault.

7. I control my finances.  I might never make as much money as some writers.  I might not make as much as I would have made working for that friend who offered me a job in Hollywood all those years ago.  But I am not in this for the money, although money is a factor.  I can earn more if I work harder.  I have put myself in the position, as a lawyer friend once told me, to hit not one, not two, but multiple home runs financially.  I might never do so.  But I have the chance, a chance I wouldn’t have had if I had taken a day job.

That chance means less than you think it would, especially if you’re still putting in your 40 hours for a paycheck.  Because you are working for the money, so you’d expect me to as well. But I’m not.  I’m working for the enjoyment.  And study after study after study shows that people who work for themselves are happier than people who work for someone else.

Other studies show that people who are happier live longer than those who are unhappy.  I’d much rather be like Frederik Pohl who, in his nineties, is writing a blog and publishing a book a  year than I would be like a friend of mine who has retired in his sixties, doesn’t know what to do with his days, and is now worried (because of the changes in the economy) that his pension will run out.

Retirement falls into that vacation mindset to me. I retired from editing at the age of 37, and I was happy to do so. Relieved, actually.  I never ever want to do that again.

But retire from writing? Who are you kidding? When I die, I want to die like Jack Williamson did.  He was in his mid-nineties and had just finished a novel.  Or like Robert B. Parker, who died at his desk, while working on the current book.

8. A continual intellectual challenge.  I’m always learning something and doing something new.  Not just related to writing, but also related to business.  I follow court cases that apply to my field, financial regulations that deal with publishing, the changes in publishing methods now happening all over the world.  I constantly work to improve my craft.  I’m always reading something weird and interesting connected to my job (see my Recommended Reading List).  I travel to places I would never have seen otherwise, from places as beautiful as Paris to places as unexpectedly interesting as Salt Lake City.  Each trip is an adventure and each adventure comes from my work.  But I still work.  The last time I was in Paris, I slept very little, not just because of the book tour interviews and signings, but because I stayed up late every night, writing down what I did, and making notes for future stories, doing research, and learning as much as I could about a new city and a new country.  I think these things are fun and challenging.  And lucky me, they’re part of my job.

9. The harder I work, the luckier I am.  That’s the real secret to freelancing.  We seem to have lost the value of hard work.  People want to take things easy, and if you’re one of them, don’t freelance.  But if you like to be busy, then freelance.  You’ll always have too much to do.

But the real secret to freelancing?

Enjoyment.  It’s all about the fun.  When I teach writers, I give them a writing assignment and then tell them to go play. They often look at me like I’m nuts.  But seriously, that’s what I do.  I’m playing every day.  I make things up for a living.  I do something I would do even if no one ever paid me for it.

I’m having fun.

Life is hard enough without slogging through your daily existence.  We all get sick. We all lose family and friends. We all have setbacks and failures and unexpected (nasty) surprises.  Why add on the burden of a hated job if you can at all avoid it?  The biggest benefit to freelancing—for me, anyway—is the fact that it makes life enjoyable.

I even recognized that in the depths of my despair a few years ago.  The worst day at my freelance job is better than the best day at any day job I’ve ever had.

That’s what has kept me freelancing for thirty years.

And, if I’m lucky, will keep me freelancing for at least thirty more.

And there it is. The last installment of the Freelancer’s Guide.  <Whew>  140,000 words of material.  I’ll be spending the next three weeks trimming it down, getting rid of the repetition, and making it presentable.  Then I’ll send out e-copies to everyone who has donated.

Sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll do a short post on the experiment that is the Guide: Did it work the way I expected? Do I consider it a success? I’ll crunch a few numbers, figure out the tangible and intangible benefits, and let those of you who’ve come along for the ride know how it all went.

Thanks ever so much for being a part of this. As I said, it’s been fun.

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: “The Benefits of Freelancing” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.