What is The Author Biz

The Author Biz is devoted to bridging the gap between the art and craft of writing and the nitty-gritty details of running a business.

Since you’ve found your way here you already know how quickly the world is changing for authors at all levels. The number of books published annually has increased by around 1,000% in the last decade while the number of bookstores in the United States has shrunk by 31%.

The old model of writing a book, and having it discovered in bookstores has become a fond, but fleeting memory for authors.

Why? There are a few reasons, but one that stands out to me. Anything that can be digitized will be digitized in our modern world. And once something is digitized, everything changes. Remember when people listened to albums, tape cassettes, or God forbid, even eight-track tapes?

Change is washing over the publishing business, and while it’s interesting to watch people fight to protect the way things were instead of embracing the way things are, it’s not helpful to the rest of us.

It’s time to adapt, learn new skills, and take more control over our publishing lives, whether we’re traditionally published, self-published or some combination of the two. Not the one-time, take a class, and you’re done, type learning. What I’m talking about is the ongoing, continual learning that becomes a part of the way we work.

The Author Biz is committed to keeping you up to date, and to providing solutions for dealing with the ongoing changes in the business, the technology, and yes, even in the craft of writing.

My Story

My name is Stephen Campbell, and I’ve spent my working life in the rapidly evolving world of technology. I was the CFO (Chief Financial Officer) for two different Inc. 500 companies before realizing I didn’t care for big company life and going off on my own.

I launched the first of my technology companies in 1993. Within a few years, my partners and I owned and ran three different companies, all in the software space, and employed around 50 people.

We worked hard and were lucky to be in a fast growing market. But we also were smart enough to search out the advice of experts. People who were already successfully doing what we wanted to do. Learning from others, both from their mistakes, and from their successes, is a skill we worked hard to develop.

We sold two of those companies and moved into the next decade, dealing with dramatic shifts in the world of technology. Business models that worked brilliantly in 1998 didn’t work as well by 2002 and didn’t work at all in 2005.

So how did we stay relevant? Adapt and change. Survive and advance. We started new companies, used new strategies, and generally changed everything.

Fast forward to 2012. All but one of the companies have been sold. I was 56 years old and at loose ends when a friend asked me what I still wanted to do with my life. Wow! What a great question, right? Why hadn’t I asked it of myself? Without even thinking, I heard myself saying I wanted to write a book. Uh oh. The cat is officially out of the bag. I said it out loud, so now I either needed to write a book or decide it’s okay to ignore a lifelong dream.

That question started me down the path I’m walking (and sometimes stumbling) along today. I’m a lifelong reader, and like most lifelong readers, always assumed I could write, but I was wrong. I needed training. I took classes, went to conferences and began writing short stories and then manuscripts. My education as a writer is ongoing, and you can follow that education at my personal site, www.stephenrcampbell.com.

As I learned, I developed an interest in the changes taking place with publishing. They were so similar to what I’d gone through in my past businesses. Maybe. Just maybe, my experience could help other authors to navigate both the current, and the upcoming changes in the business.

To be clear, I am not an expert in publishing. Far from it. I’m learning myself, but I know the fastest way to learn is to ask questions.  And who better to ask than the experts I have on The Author Biz podcast each week.

The weekly Author Biz Podcast is one way in which I can share what I learn with a community of people for whom I have such tremendous respect, authors.