What to do with no money.

I’ve spoken with a couple of business advisors/small business owners/successful authors over the years, and I’ve noticed an upsetting trend when I speak to any of them. With every single one of them, I ask, “How can I get started if I don’t have any money?”

The standard answer makes me grind my teeth, and is frankly bourgeoisie:
“You need to think of your writing as a business investment and spend the money even if you don’t want to.”

Whoa.

Excuse me, the question was not, “I am RELUCTANT to spend money, even though I have it, how do I do this cheaply?” The question was “How do I get started with NO MONEY?”

No money as in I am on food stamps. No money as in my husband has been unemployed for two years. No money as in I almost lost my house last year. No money as in I can’t buy new frigging socks.

No money as in, there is no way in hell any bank would consider me for even the smallest business loan, and I can’t commit to paying it back if my books fail, so I won’t even ask.

Do you know what the word “investment” means to people with no money? Something that people with money do that we don’t fully understand, and there’s no need to fully understand it anyway as we do not have any money.

Do not hand me the “investment” answer. Do. Not.

And do not hand me the “scarcity mindset” crapola, either. I spent years refusing to believe that I was broke with the whole Law of Attraction thing in mind. I never got unbroke. And when I would lose out on something, a job, cash, a huge bill I wasn’t expecting and couldn’t pay, my fellow Law of Attractionites would say, “Oh, you must have brought this on yourself somehow.” And somehow, this doesn’t seem like victim blaming to anyone — it didn’t seem like it to me for a long time, either, until one day I realized — I was feeling guilty over my own poverty, and struggling to find some way to fix it — as if I have mystical control over the economic downturn that led to my husband getting laid off, or the straggling minimum wage that I used to be able to live pretty reasonably off of and that I no longer can. Telling someone that if they have the right mindset everything will be okay is a desperate and futile hope — and a rather mean one, really. (I don’t do Law of Attraction anymore.)

All of that being said, let me tell you how I got started with literally $0.00.

Thing number one: Computer. Make friends with some geeks. I got my first computer from a friend who built it for me out of spare parts that were going to get trashed anyway. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it worked for word processing, and that’s all I used it for. When it was time to upload stuff, I took a flash drive to a friend’s computer that had good internet.

Thing number two: word processing program. Do not hand me all the fancy bells and whistles you think you need. People wrote by hand for centuries, and by typewriter for decades. You do not need Vellum or Scrivner to write. If you can afford them, great, I’m sure they’re useful. You know what I use? Open Office — or Libre Office, I think that’s the latest offshoot. It’s FREE, and it does all the things. You need to keep track of story arcs or character development or scenes? Use the spreadsheet program that comes with it for FREE — or just use a pen and a notebook. Google “bullet journaling.”

Thing number three: editing. First off, make friends with other writers and do critique exchanges. You can find them online if you can’t find them in person. Recruit friends and family — find the readers you know and beg them to read your draft. Make them promise to be brutal. And when you get comments back, edit the thing yourself SIX MILLION TIMES. The more passes you make, the more likely you are to wind up with a decent finished product. If you can hire an editor, that’s awesome, do it. If you can’t, read the book over and over and over and over. I got all of my editing how-to books from friends who were writers, from thrift stores, and from the library. Read them. Take notes. Then edit, edit, edit.

Thing number four: formatting the finished book. You can absolutely do this on Open Office. It will not be super snazzy, but it will be tidy, and it will be readable, and those things are far more impressive than a book with fancy-font drop-caps at the beginning of each chapter. It will take some time to learn, but there are cheap/free resources out there and you do not have to hire anyone to do it for you. Also, I have looked, many peoples’ e-books (including big publishers’) look like shit. If you can put out something tidy that doesn’t distract from the reading, you will be doing great.

Thing number five: cover art. Don’t do it yourself. For real. Find a friend who is a graphic designer or post online in the many writing forums that you are looking for a cover artist and you can’t spend much for it. Give an amount. To some people, $300 is cheap cover art. If you need it free, say so, and offer something in exchange. There are people out there who will help. The writing community is pretty awesome.

Thing number six: bars codes and legal junk. (Please note, I AM NOT A LAWYER!) People will tell you that whoever sells/gives you the barcodes you buy will be listed as the “publisher” of your book. This is true. It’s also trivial. If all your “publisher” does is tell you you can do whatever you want with the book and also take it down at any time, who gives a rip who’s actually listed as publisher? Smashwords and Amazon both give you free AISN #s to use on your e-books, Createspace (which might be going defunct now that KDP has print) gives you free barcodes to use on your paperbacks. Nook will, too, but they are owned by an evil company that will use your books against your will, so don’t publish direct though them, use Smashwords or Draft 2 Digital to distribute to Nook. As for copyrighting, look into the laws of your country. USA copyright law is actually pretty easy to follow. copyright.gov You DO NOT need to register your copyright to protect your work, but you can, and it is $35 to do so. I registered my first book, and I haven’t done any of the others. But for real, the hard part is marketing a book, not writing it. If someone “steals your idea and makes a million dollars” 1) it was almost certainly the hard work they did marketing, not your idea, 2) for real, it ain’t gonna happen.

Thing number seven: sales and advertising. I am still not quite to this point, but I will tell you what I’ve done so far. 1) Borrowed $50 from a friend to buy six copies in paperback of the first book. 2) Sold those six copies to other friends, paid my friend back, and bough twelve copies. 3) Sold those books to friends, used the money to buy a booth at a local craft fair and twenty more books. 4) Sold the twenty books at the craft fair, used the money to buy booths at more craft fairs and get more books. 5) Lather, rinse, repeat. I’m not rolling in dough by any means, but I have a few local fans, a few hundred bucks in my book bank account on any given day, and I’m ready to start a decent advertising campaign online as soon as my next book is done. There are several places to advertise for free online, as well as pretty inexpensively. I have used the money I’ve made to buy better book covers, as well. Editing — meh, I spent a LOT of time on that. I’m confident about the editing. Also, blogging is kinda fun, but I haven’t made one single solitary sale from it. Don’t do it if you think you’ll get sales. Public author appearances are also a bust. I’ve done a few for fun, but that’s all they are. Some fun. Local TV and newspaper mentions will also get you nowhere. Even the craft fairs are really only good for that day, for what I directly hand-sell. People take business cards and I never hear from them again.

So that is how you scrap out an independent book with no money. With literally NO MONEY. If all you have is time, you put in the time. If you are smart enough to write a well-written book, you can figure out the other stuff. I’ve had other indies tell me that their time was better spent writing the next book rather than learning all of these skills — if you can afford it, that’s great. But to quote an old song, time ain’t money when all you got is time. I’ve heard other authors bemoan that they would never be able to publish independently because it’s so expensive. Bullshit! No more excuses! If you want to do this, you will figure it out. If you want to whine about how you can’t, then you don’t really want to do it. And I don’t think that’s victim blaming.