4 Things Every Professional Writer Needs to Know

When I glance backward along the path I have walked as a writer, I often reflect that there are many things I wish I had known at the start of my journey. Every path through life involves a lot of hard-earned lessons. I don’t think any amount of preparation or research can prevent that.

Still, there are a few basics I wish someone had drawn me aside to point out. At the very least, it would have pointed me in the right direction before I spent a lot of time and energy meandering down pointless side paths.

There’s a lot of writing advice out there – and a lot of it conflicts, making it difficult for new writers to determine what they should focus on. But it may surprise you that none of the items on my list today have anything to do with the writing craft. Instead, I want to focus on the realities of treating writing as a business.

When you stop writing as a hobby and start trying to make money in earnest, there are several things that can cause you trouble if you don’t know to be aware of them ahead of time. I consider myself somewhat fortunate in that I learned most of these things early in the process. (Though some I still struggle with today.)

If you’re looking for the most basic considerations before you decide to go all in on making writing your career, this is the post for you! Here are the top 4 things I believe every writer should have at least a basic understanding of before they take the dive into career territory.

Copyright Law and Intellectual Property Rights

Copyright is one of the most important things for any creator to understand. Especially since you own the rights to a work the second you create it – no registration of any kind is required. Still, intellectual property rights are consistently misunderstood by many of the people who rely on them every day, which can make it difficult to determine how things actually work.

I’m not a lawyer, and a detailed explanation of how copyright laws work is well beyond the scope of this blog. I remember numerous conversations from my youth where family members encouraged me to mail myself manuscripts in order to copyright them. Not to mention a pervasive fear among the community that agents and editors might steal work from submissions.

If you want to publish your work, whether or not you want to make money off of it, it is critical to understand your legal rights and what’s required to defend them. There’s plenty of information on the Internet, but there’s also a lot of misinformation involved in conversations of this subject. It is therefore critical to go to the source and find accurate legal information on how copyright works in your country.

If you are outside the US, it’s critical to know how the law works in your area. And if you are planning to publish in a country that’s not your home country, it’s equally critical to understand how the law works in all areas where your work will appear.

If this sounds complicated, that’s because any legal matter can be. But it’s not as daunting as it seems. Most countries have straightforward laws about intellectual property rights. You need to make sure you understand them because they’re going to come up fairly often during the publishing process.

Selling Rights and Reversions

The most important reason to understand your rights is so you understand what you’re giving away when you sign a publishing contract. Most magazines want first rights for short stories. Which means they’re looking for work that hasn’t been previously published. They want to be the first to share your work, and they want an exclusive time period to display that work before you take it elsewhere. (Usually 1 year.)

Book contracts are different. Publishers want to make sure they can maximize their profit off of your work in the long-term. If you’re publishing a series, they will probably want to ensure you can’t seek another publisher midway through the series. They may also want the rights to your creation so they can seek secondary markets such as making movies based on your work.

If you agree to give a publisher the rights to you work, you need to know the extent of that agreement. For example, if a publisher gains the right to your series, you wouldn’t be able to use the same characters in another series published by a different publisher. You also wouldn’t be able to re-publish your work unless or until you regain the rights from the publisher. Which means it’s important to know when and how the rights revert back to you.

Having at least a passing familiarity with intellectual property laws will help you identify what the publisher is asking for so you can ask the proper questions for clarification. Ideally, every writer wants to maintain as many rights to their work as possible so they don’t need to keep gaining their publisher’s permission to create more content. The best way to make a business savvy contract, aside from having a lawyer, is to know what you’re looking at and working with.

Vanity Presses

Most writers become aware of vanity presses fairly early in their writing journey. There are plenty of warnings floating around out there for those that haven’t yet encountered them. If you haven’t heard of them yet, or have only passing familiarity with them, it’s important to understand why they’re dangerous.

People like to talk about the fact that vanity presses will publish anything. In the past, people believed the lack of gate-keeping resulted in a lower quality. But that isn’t the real problem with vanity presses. The main problem is that they charge writers in order to publish their work.

You can identify a vanity press because they will probably send you a bill upfront. These days, a lot of them claim that the money is for advertising. In the past, they would charge you for the cost of creating your book. They might even send you order forms to encourage family and friends to sign up to purchase copies of the book to help cover the cost of publication.

While it might feel great to have an offer by someone to help publish your book and share it with the world, it’s important to remember that every artist deserves to make money off of their efforts. As part of the publication process, money should flow toward the creator. This means that a publisher should pay you an advance for your work. They usually also provide you with services like editing and a cover artist.

If money is flowing outward toward the publisher, that’s a red flag. Again, knowing what to look for in a contract or communication can save you a lot of hassle. It’s far better to know what warning signs to look for so you can avoid pitfalls before falling into them.

The Path to Success is Not a Steady Climb

Up until this point, everything I’ve mentioned is important for protecting yourself from legal trouble. But if anyone ever asked me the one thing I wished someone told me when I first started, it would be this.

The path to success is not a steady climb. It’s full of lifts and falls, peaks and troughs. You make a little headway, then you slip backward.

This is the reality of trying to build a business and make a profit. The market is always changing. What people find entertaining this year might fall completely off of their radar next year. Those that write to marketing trends need to be able to work quickly and adapt as the desire in the market shifts. Those who write for passion need to be aware that attracting an audience will be a slower process if they’re not tapping into those big market pushes.

Even the tools that authors use for marketing wax and wane in terms of usefulness. As the way we engage with technology changes and as the websites we frequent shift, marketing techniques that worked a week ago can flatline.

As with any new skill, publishing comes with a learning curve. And sometimes quite a daunting one. If you had a few good months followed by a bad one, that doesn’t make you a failure. That’s just how things go. On the climb to success, you’ll experience many plateaus and even some sheer cliffs.

The most important thing is to never give up. Keep experimenting, keep researching, and most importantly keep trying until you find what works for you. And if you find yourself in a slump, remember to try something new. The only way to truly fail as a writer is to give up completely.