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I’ve never had any formal management training. Yet I’ve
ended up running more organizations than I ever intended.
It started when I was a first year teacher, age twenty-two,
and I took over leadership of a small school as a principal-teacher, which
entailed doing everything that a principal does plus teaching a partial class
load. From there, I developed and ran a new program at a community college—the
college president even said he’d help groom me for his position, but I declined.
I led a high school language arts department. I ran a real estate brokerage. I
ran a writing center. I run an author’s collective.
I’ve also run a host of small businesses: educational
supplies; a bed and breakfast; educational services; writing and editing
services; a book publishing venture. In each of these, the only person I
supervised (and answered to) is myself. That’s how I like it. Despite (or because of?) my experience, I don't enjoy running things, especially when it involves supervision.
When I started publishing on my own, I vowed from the start
that I wasn’t going to get sidetracked from my creative work. I wasn’t going to
start acquiring books by other authors and dealing with all the hassles that
come from growing into a bigger operation. Personalities. Expectations.
Production schedules that affect anyone besides me.
For me, it feels like the right decision. But from a business
standpoint, it may not be the smartest.
I’m working on a series articles for The Independent, the monthly magazine of the Independent Book
Publishers Association. One of them is on self-published authors who grew their
own highly profitable publishing companies. Like Dominque Raccah, who founded Sourcebooks in a spare bedroom back in
1987, most of these incredibly successful businesses started with a single title.
I’m interested to discover how—and why—people like Raccah made the leap
into full-fledged publishing. Who knows? Perhaps what I learn will change my publishing vision.
What about you? What sort of nudge would it take for you to
expand your publishing reach—and increase your profit potential—by handling
titles other than ones you’ve written yourself? If nothing could convince you
to expand beyond your own work, why not?
(Feel free to leave your name and a book title with your
comment if you’d like me to consider it for the article).
Co-founder of 49 Writers and founder of the
independent authors cooperative Running
Fox Books, Deb Vanasse has authored sixteen books. Her most
recent are Write
Your Best Book, a practical guide to writing books that rise above the
rest; What
Every Author Should Know, a comprehensive guide to book publishing and
promotion; and Cold
Spell, a novel that “captures the harsh beauty of the terrain as well as
the strain of self-doubt and complicated family bonds,” according to Booklist. Deb lives and works on Hiland Mountain outside of Anchorage, Alaska, and at a cabin near the
Matanuska Glacier.
