Write Now with Scrivener, Episode no. 52: Jane Friedman, Publishing Industry Specialist

Show notes:

• Jane Friedman
• The Business of Being a Writer
• The School of Life: How to Reform Capitalism

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Jane Friedman has been analyzing and reporting on the publishing business for more than 25 years. Her latest book is the second edition of The Business of Being a Writer.

Many writers learn the craft of writing but don’t learn much about the business. If they want to sell their writing, they are often in the dark about what it entails. Jane’s new book is for those who are "new to what it means to publish, what it means to be visible, what it means to have a career as an author."

You can learn creative writing, in a university course, and you can get a degree, but these courses don’t explain what happens after you’ve written a book. Jane says, "I was motivated to write this book by all of the people who are in writing programs like I was when I was in college. What I heard from them, especially at conferences and events, is that no one told me that I would be going into debt for a degree, that I would then not be able to pay off because I didn’t realize book advances or book sales don’t equate to a living wage."

This isn’t to say that MFA courses in creative writing are worthless. "I think the reason that many writers do that is for the networking, for the names that they can add to their resume. I studied under XYZ, and if they have a positive experience in their program, their professors and mentors are going to make referrals and introductions. I do not think publishing is about who you know, but it is a very relationship-driven business and so those can be very formative and important."

Publishing is a big business, and most writers are unprepared to navigate the way the business is structured. Jane says that many writers have "grown up with what I call the dream, and the dream would be having the New York editor select you out of the slush pile and then get you onto the New York Times bestseller list. If that’s what you are envisioning you are only seeing 1% of what the industry is and you may not understand the full spectrum of options available to you."

And these options have changed in the 25 years that Jane has been writing about the industry. There are options available now that didn’t exist at the turn of the century. "We now have a really active and flourishing self-publishing market. It’s much more straightforward to put your work on the market without the help of a publisher because of Amazon, because of the Kindle, because of the e-book format."

But it’s not enough to publish a book; authors need to market their book, whether it goes through a traditional publisher or if it’s self-published. Jane explains, "The other thing that’s possible is marketing directly to readers because of social media and email newsletters And, again, the fact that you don’t have to have your book on a bookstore shelf or in the library in order to make it visible to your target market."

Many writers don’t like the idea that they are essentially small businesses, "because they see themselves as artists. There’s this long-standing myth that art and business don’t go together. I don’t think that belief is really helpful for writers flourishing."

One section of the book that is important in these days of social media is the chapter on platform building. A platform is your presence on social media, which could be through a website, email newsletter, Substack, TikTok, or YouTube. "That’s a question that comes up for every writer, even if they’re not published. They quickly hear agents and publishers discussing platform and it creates so much anxiety, there’s so much confusion."

Jane used Scrivener to write this book and also used Scrivener for the first edition. "The first thing I did was dust off that file and start thinking, chapter by chapter, what needed to be moved or deleted. I had a section of the file where I was moving chapters that I felt weren’t going to exist in the second edition. And then creating placeholders for additional or new content that I wanted to add."

Jane had lots of content on her website that she incorporated and repurposed for this edition. "I created these placeholder chapter files in the Scrivener document. Let’s say [there’s a chapter] about email newsletters. I’ll go back to everything that I’ve written or said about email newsletters in the past seven or eight years. I’ll dump it all in there. I don’t typically start writing at that point. I just dump it all in. And then when I’m ready to start writing or revising, I’ll go and take a look at what I’ve got and start selecting the most important points that I want to emphasize. And then I start writing from that. I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily repurposing or using that material, but it reminds me of what I think are the most salient points that are going to last another seven years."

Jane’s book can help you navigate a business that has changed radically in recent years. "When I first entered the business, if you were a self-published author, it was insanely difficult to make any progress. Today, it doesn’t have to take really any investment, which of course means the market is flooded with all sorts of books. But still, I would rather that authors have a choice than feel stuck with the system we had when I started."