Scale your author business like a startup

This article is from one of my favorite new Substack writers, Kern Carter, about one of my favorite subjects, scaling your author business.

I recommend reading Growth, or something like it, Setting up your direct sales environment, and How to reframe capitalism to make sales and marketing work (better) for you to help round out this article.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.

I love ’s Writers are Superstars Substack. So when they emailed me about contributing to The Author Stack I was super excited and couldn’t say yes fast enough. Kern and I share a love of using business strategy, especially tech startup strategy, and applying it to our author business.

If you haven’t read their work, this is one of my favorite articles. Watch out, though. It’ll get your dander up.

Call me delusional, but I really do believe that writers can build brands and businesses on par with any other industry out there. We already possess the skill of communicating our ideas. What we need to add are the structures to make sure those ideas reach the right audience. I've always known that creating deliberate structures leads to success, but it wasn't until I started working for startups that I learned how to adapt those structures to my author business.

In this article, I’m going to share four ways you can scale your author business like a startup. By scale, I mean expanding your business to a mass audience outside of your current community. You’re looking for new readers or consumers, and you’re looking for a lot more of them. Scaling also implies speed, so your goal is to expand quickly, keeping in mind that “quickly” can be somewhat relative.

If you want to scale, ambition is where you need to start. You really have to want this and be willing to harness that ambition into disciplined, repeatable steps that bring you closer to your goal of growth and expansion. Applying tactics utilized by startups is one way to get there. 

Okay, enough preamble. Here are four ways you can scale your author business like a startup. 

*** Please note that if you are reading this via email, Substack only sent out a partial version and the article will eventually stop without notice. If you want to read the whole 4,500-word article, then go to this website.***

Experimentation 

When I started my first Substack, it was meant to be a place for me to release one post a month as part of a short story series I was working on called My Failures As A Father. That initial idea eventually turned into Love & Literature, a platform that hosted writers sharing real-life stories from all over the world in weekly chapters. From Italy to the Middle East, India to the U.S., Love & Lit formed into something I didn’t see when I initially wrote that short story, but because I was open to experimenting, to trying things, it turned into something else; something even more beautiful and impactful than I could’ve imagined. 

What you’re looking for when you’re experimenting is the right mix between opportunity and impact. Opportunity involves discovering where whatever you’re creating fits into the marketing. Impact involves increasing the broadness of a community you impact and how deeply you influence that community. 

What does that look like for authors? It means experimenting with different platforms (Substack, website, social media). It means experimenting with different forms and mediums (blogging, video, short stories, audio). It can also mean experimenting with different ways of bringing attention to your writing.

Have you tried any guerilla marketing tactics1, in-person events, partnerships, or paid ad campaigns? The only thing that should limit your experimentation is your imagination. 

Systems and Processes 

When startups begin their journey, it’s one or two people doing everything that needs to be done. There’s no real system behind it. When something pops up, you handle it. Those are the beginning days. But when you’re ready to scale, you need to create predictability and consistency. You can’t create those things without implementing systems. 

And yes, creative businesses have systems, too. For instance, my creative partner and I use “sprints” to create script ideas for the film production side of our business. Here’s how we do it: 

• We have one long brainstorming session to focus on loose story ideas that each of us have

• The outcome of this session is one idea each that we can take away to start working on individually

• We give ourselves three days to create an outline for the idea

• We share the idea with each other and then give ourselves two days to give feedback

• Once feedback is given, we give ourselves seven days to write a pilot (the first episode of a series) 

• Once pilots are complete, we share with each other and give three days for feedback

• Once feedback is complete, we each have another five days to complete the pilot

• Once the pilots are complete, we create a pitch deck for each one

In the last month alone, this process has produced four story ideas that we’ve pitched to production companies, broadcasters, and prepared for grants. We don’t do this every month, but when we do, we follow this process every time. The process creates efficiency and a system we can apply whether it’s just us or if we welcome other writers. It’s the most effective way to get from idea to offer (script) without sacrificing quality. 

As an author, you can implement sprints to become more prolific with your output.

Pitching [bold] ideas

How do you think startups get the money they need to scale? They pitch2. As an author, what’s one way you can convince agents, publishers, and readers that they need to buy into your book? You got it. Pitching. 

I never understand why pitching isn’t at the top of the list of skills all authors fight to learn. When you query agents and publishers, you’re pitching. If you’re crowdfunding for your next book, you’re pitching. If you have an idea you want to execute to market and promote your book, that’s a pitch too. 

Startup founders learn to get comfortable pitching for money. I’ve totally adopted this mentality into my author business. For instance, remember I told you about my original idea for Substack that turned into Love & Literature? My creative partner and I had this idea to create a similar platform but for teenagers.

We’re currently working on another idea and this time we’re not asking for five figures, we’re asking for seven. It’s a bold idea, but so what? We need to be bold. Entrepreneurs get funded for their startups every single day. Why can’t you? 

And if you’re not into bold ideas, you still need to learn how to pitch. The reason we run our film production in sprints is so we can create enough ideas to constantly be pitching. The minimum amount we’ve earned for developing a film or series has been $25k. For actually producing a film, it’s been six figures. We didn’t have a full script completed when we received either of those funds. We pitched an idea. You can do that too. 

Where can you get started? Pitching starts and ends with creating a deck3. A deck is a detailed summary of your idea for presentation to stakeholders or investors. In your case, readers can also be considered stakeholders, particularly if you’re crowdfunding, but also agents, publishers, and brands.

Your deck needs to distill your idea down to its main points. For example, if you’re pitching your book to producers as a series or film, you need to show why your story should be made into a film, the audience for that story, and why now is the right time for your story to be made. If you’re pitching to brands for sponsorship, you’ll need to include how your two brands align and what the potential sponsor stands to gain. 

Creating multiple offers 

For a business to scale, it needs revenue. To generate revenue, you need to be offering something. Those offers need to vary4 from premium to pedestrian, and all of them need to make sense within your brand.

A premium offer is your highest ticket5 item. It’s the thing that costs the most. If you were a musician, this offer would be your merch – those $120 t-shirts fans buy when they’re at a concert. When you’re building your author business, a premium offer can be a special edition of your book, it can be an author retreat, or it can be as simple as one-on-one time with you. 

Ghostwriting is one of the services my team offers. Even within that service, we have several tiers. Our premium offer is essentially us writing your entire book. That can be anywhere from $25k-$40k depending on many variables. But we also offer book coaching, proposal writing, and developmental editing. These services are far more affordable while still serving our community. 

Recurring Revenue

This point is a bit contentious for writers, but remember we’re talking about scaling. We’re talking about growing your business in similar fashion to Spotify or even Substack. Applying the points we mentioned earlier will help you scale, but it’s not possible without revenue, and recurring revenue more specifically. 

MRR or ARR – monthly recurring revenue and annual recurring revenue – should be the cornerstones of your business. It’s part of the predictability I mentioned earlier6. In order to scale, you need to know how much money you’re consistently earning – month to month, quarter to quarter, year to year. When you add variety to your offers, this becomes more possible. 

And to be clear, whether ARR or MRR is your gauge, you need a gauge. Monthly recurring revenue might not fit into your business structure, but what about quarterly?7 Can you assess your revenue in three-month increments rather than monthly? Or maybe yearly works better?

Yes, creative industries are a bit different, but business is business. To properly scale, you need money coming in consistently so it can be allocated consistently and intentionally8. 

Remember I told you that part of scaling is speed. The more consistently you’re able to earn revenue, the faster you’ll be able to scale. And the faster you scale, the more readers you touch which fuels your business to continue scaling. It’s a cycle. For example, if Substack is your main vehicle right now and you have 1,000 subscribers after one year, scaling would be trying to get to 10,000 subscribers in the next six months. When you hit those numbers, you’ll be able to pitch potential sponsors. That brings in more revenue that leads to more growth and the cycle continues. 

Being a writer isn’t hard. It’s what we love. Becoming the type of person you need to be to run a successful writer business is hard. It often feels counterintuitive to implement processes and systems into something as personal and intimate as writing, but if we want to make money and scale our businesses into something that feeds our lifestyle, then we need to become those people.

If you liked that one from Kern, make sure to check out their Substack for even more of this good good goodness.

I recommend reading Growth, or something like it, Setting up your direct sales environment, and How to reframe capitalism to make sales and marketing work (better) for you to help round out this article.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.