Holy Macaroni, Sean Bishop's blog post about the state of the publishing industry gave me so much to think about that I don't even know where to begin.
     Sometimes, I lament my (poor?) timing in coming into the writing/publishing world (i.e. now) because it seems that things were so much simpler before the Internet--you either made it or you didn't. You got an agent, got an advance, got your book published, went on a book tour and that was it. Or at least that's my understanding of it. The writers who managed to do all of that could actually spend their days writing instead of working at some other job and simply writing in their spare time. They could answer the question, "What do you do?" by saying that they were a writer rather than saying that they were a, oh I don't know, cabinetmaker.
     But alas, it's much more complicated now, which as Bishop points out is mostly a good thing, but whether you think of it as good or bad is largely irrelevant because the world has moved and if you don't move with it you're just going to get left behind.
     The whole thing reminded me of this guy I used to work for. He owned his own cabinet shop and I was one of three loyal employees. The man had been building cabinets for twenty plus years and he could design and build almost anything, but he was a terrible businessman. Our paychecks would regularly bounce when we deposited them and he would inevitably make up some ridiculous excuse about how it was the bank's fault, but we all knew that he was responsible.
     The point is, you can't successfully run your own business if you are terrible at the business part, even if you are really good at making whatever you are selling. And in this day and age, being a writer or publisher is pretty much like running your own business. It doesn't matter how good of a writer you are, if you can't run the business end of things.
     Like my old boss, I've probably bounced a few metaphorical checks thus far in my writing career, but Bishop's piece really made me think about all of this in a new way. Running a "business" might be the death of me, but I guess I'd rather die trying than not.