The Profitable Author: 1,001 Ways to Build a Business You Love Around Your Books
About this ebook
Are you tired of earning meager royalties or Amazon deposits? Do you dream of turning your passion for writing into a thriving business? In The Profitable Author, publishing veteran Sharon Woodhouse reveals the insider secrets to creating a multi-faceted author career that goes beyond book sales.
Drawing on over 25 years of experience as an indie publisher, Woodhouse provides a practical framework for building a sustainable and rewarding author life. This isn’t about chasing bestsellers or landing a movie deal (though those are nice when they happen). It’s about understanding the business of being an author, implementing proven strategies (over 1,001!) to generate multiple streams of income from your books, expertise, and experience, and empowering you to take charge of your author journey.
The Profitable Author guides you step-by-step through:
~Identifying 15 different author income streams, from ebook sales and events to services, merch, and rights sales.
~Designing a customized author business model that aligns with your goals, values, and lifestyle.
~Unlocking creative financing hacks to fund your dreams.
~Finessing author events (and getting paid!).
~Unleashing your inner entrepreneur and monetizing your expertise.
~Embracing the power of non-bookstore and volume sales.
~Mastering essential business skills (without losing your creative spark), including marketing, sales, negotiating, networking, and mindset.
~Crafting a fabulous sales and marketing plan tailored to YOU and your books, whether you’re a fiction writer, a nonfiction expert, a cookbook queen, or a children’s book hero.
~Cultivating a network of support to help you thrive as an authorpreneur.
Packed with real-world examples, actionable advice, and inspiring insights, The Profitable Author is your essential guide to creating the author life you deserve. Stop waiting for success to find you—take charge and build the profitable author business you love.
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About the author
Author Sharon Woodhouse is a former indie book publisher and current owner of Conspire Creative, a book business agency that offers coaching, consulting, project management, and business support services for authors and indie publishers. She writes about all aspects of creating holistic, income-generating author businesses you love and finding your place in the vibrant ecosystem of books.
Woodhouse has taken an entrepreneurial approach to just about everything since first becoming self-employed as a teenager over three decades ago. She has directly counseled and coached hundreds of authors, publishers, solo professionals, creative small business owners, and job-changers in various aspects of setting up shop, running a small book-related enterprise, publishing, and promotion, emphasizing options, customized approaches, strategic planning, inexpensive and creative marketing, win-win partnerships, and developing an entrepreneurial mindset. She has helped tens of thousands of other authors through her teaching, group coaching, and writing.
In 1994, Woodhouse founded her first publishing company and created with a small staff the beloved Chicago brand of Lake Claremont Press. LCP published over 500,000 books of 80 different titles in its 25 years and won 30 small press awards. In 2011, she started Everything Goes Media, LLC, to encompass her growing range of book industry activities, including consulting, coaching, mediation, print brokering, private publishing, and project management.
Sharon’s businesses, and the authors and books she has published, have been featured in hundreds of local, national, and international media outlets, including A&E, the BBC, Business Week, the Chicago Tribune, CNN, Crain’s Chicago Business, FOX, the History Channel, NPR, the National Geographic Channel, the New York Times, the Travel Channel, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
Her clients have included all manner of authors, publishers, creatives, business owners, thought leaders, project leaders, consultants, scientists, academics, tradespeople, public figures, corporate dropouts, mid-lifers in transition, students, and retirees. They have come from the arts, the trades, business, academia, law, government, medicine, engineering, science, nonprofits, museums, fundraising, finance, entertainment, media, journalism, and four different continents. Many are multi-passionate, multi-talented, multi-hyphenates!
Sharon received her coaching training from Coach Training Alliance, and is a certified professional coach and a member of the International Coach Federation. She has studied mediation and conflict resolution for 35 years, including with the Peace and Global Studies Department of Earlham College; through NGOs in Geneva, Rome, and Budapest; the ABA; and Mediate.com. She has a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Illinois-Chicago and a Graduate Certificate in Mediation and Negotiation from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She has an M.A. in Communication from UWM, where her work focused on mediation, difficult conversations, and coaching presence.
Woodhouse is a longtime advocate of entrepreneurship, vibrant urban neighborhoods, old movie palaces, public transportation, free speech, science, and civilized civic behavior. Her most cherished win was co-leading a community effort to save the historic Davis Theater in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood. She currently lives and works in Chicago's Lakeview East neighborhood.
Follow her writing on holistic author businesses, entrepreneurship for authors, book publishing, and book marketing on Medium (@slowcharacter) and Substack (conspirecreative.substack.
