I’m getting closer to understanding what I’m really doing with myself with work, and it feels better than ever. Here’s what it involves:
- Customers: building a community of (readers) to give me the true direction of my business.
- Artists: Rallying and scouting writers and bloggers with incentives to publish with me
- Distributors: Amazon, Apple — anyone who sells books
- Competitors: building visibility and credibility within the publishing community while also learning from and contributing to them, then absolutely destroying them.
The first three groups are my core nexus. It’s my job as a publisher and editor to draw harmony between them, with fantastic content as the common sustenance between us.
My “competitors” are a more sticky issue. I need to wedge myself into their affairs, let myself be known and likely ignored and laughed at. I’m definitely an outlier. But I need to penetrate their trade, get into their skill but without picking up their quirky habits.
Right now the real challenge is formulating a plan to “follow the reader.” I don’t know where to begin on that. How do you follow a reader, how can you anticipate what they want? How do you find them?
And then there’s the artists. I feel my biggest audience to date has been the artists. This is an important distinction to make — artists are not money makers, info peddlers. They’re artists.
As so this raises the question of my niche: non fiction? The question is a bedrock of who I am and what I represent and how I want to be associated in this life.
I do know I want to be helpful, which means non-fiction. Helpful and enjoyable and well-done. The complex made simple. Stories.
I think of the skating Olympic experience this week and I want to create and propagate that feeling, that Gift.