In an effort to get my house in order, I thought I would start with the non-creative tasks and then move my way to the fun stuff later in the week.
My first decision of the day: Publish as a business or as an individual?
Basically it came down to three things: Time, Money, Complexity. While there are plenty of very good reasons to start a business, that I will go into in a later post, it’s just too much right now. Time and Money are of the essence. If When I start selling books and making some money, I can use those funds as capital to start an official publishing business. But until then…
So off to the bank I went and quickly had a new checking and savings account ready to roll. I’ll use my Savings as Accounts Receivable and Checking as Accounts Payable to help simplify accounting later on.
I also did some research on Affiliate programs. What’s an Affiliate program you might ask? Basically, for an Indie like me, it’s a way to potentially make a little more income off the sale of your books. The basic principle is this: because you link from your page to a website that sells your book, i.e. Amazon, iTunes, etc… you are treated like a sales rep and can make a small commission on the sale of that item. In some cases it’s everything in the cart at the time of purchase. I learned this little nugget from Joanna Penn’s book “How To Make A Living With Your Writing”. An excellent resource if you are thinking of starting your own writing career. I’ll most likely set these up tomorrow.
Let me know if anyone out there has experience with affiliate programs. I would love to get some comments on successes and pitfalls.