I won’t lie: I’m nervous about the infrastructure changes I mentioned in my last newsletter.

The website migration is in full swing now. Brain Jar Press has moved to its new server, where things run faster and smoother than they did in the past.

My website has technically moved, but I’m still sending people to the old site while I redesign the front end and move the GenrePunk books and mugs over to BrainJarPress.com.

Intellectually, I know this is the right call. Emotionally…eek! (And since you’re reading this on Patreon or my website, this is the point to add ‘I was partially right!’ The transfer of the GenrePunk Ninja newsletter has not gone smoothly, which is why my Patreon re-launched and now syndicate’s these posts out to PeterMBall.com)

Change is hard, even when you know it’s the right thing. That subtle voice in the back of my head keeps whispering, “But what if this ruins everything?”

And the answer is hard: everything was already ruined. Sticking with my current set-up was going to lose me money I couldn’t afford to lose just yet.

I simply hadn’t noticed because the writing business is, at best, asynchronous.

I wanted to be a writer from a young age, which meant I got the “there’s no money in writing” speech from many people by the time I started submitting work.

Between concerned family members, guidance counselors, and random strangers on a bus, I internalized the idea that writing didn’t make money very early on.

Thirty-one years later, I’m still relatively light on “real job” experience and have made a significant chunk of my lifetime income on the back of writing and writing-related gigs.

So there’s a misunderstanding there, and as someone who now mentors new writers pretty regularly, I spend a lot of time thinking about how misunderstanding emerges.

I believe one big aspect is the way we frame work, culturally, as a relatively synchronous exchange of time for money. If I clock into an office job from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM every weekday, I will be paid a weekly wage for my time.

Time is the important element here, because I’ll be paid the same whether I’m on top of my game and killing it or feeling sluggish and half-arsing my way through the day’s tasks.

Gradually, over the course of our working life, our time gets more valuable, but the exchange of time for money is still there.

It’s a rare employer who hires you full time, pays you a huge chunk of money every year, and says, “Set your own hours. I care only about the results.”

“Work” in most people’s heads is all about the hours.

And if you think in terms of hours, writing will do your head in.

Here’s the bitter truth: writing doesn’t care about how many hours you put in. I recently tracked my time and realised that a rough draft of a short 40,000-word novel took me just shy of 22 hours.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume revisions and editing will take another 22 hours. 44 hours of work in total. Nobody is paying me an hourly wage for any of that.

Nobody, in fact, will pay me anything for the book until it’s fully revised and out into the world, and even then I’ll need to sell 586 copies to earn the equivalent of a “modest” wage for the time I put in.

The first 260 sales might get me over making the minimum hourly wage here in Australia

And that’s assuming I don’t have to invest any additional time in marketing or selling the book.

Since nobody is paying me by the hour—and selling 600 copies without marketing isn’t easy at this phase of my career—writing seems like a pretty terrible job.

Because it is.

But we shouldn’t think of it as a job. Writing is really about asset creation.

The trick of writing is disconnecting from the idea that work and income are synchronous, because writing isn’t work: it’s owning a small business.

A small business where you create assets you can continue to leverage for years—even decades—after they’re initially produced.

Assets that will appreciate and depreciate over the course of your career.

I released The Birdcage Heart & Other Strange Tales back in 2017, and it still sells copies eight years after.

I sold Exile to Apocalypse Ink Press in 2013, based on a short story series I’d written in 2011. It earned money in both iterations before the current version came into existence, and continues to sell to this day.

I released my first RPG book, House of the Transformed Toad, back in 2005. It still makes money as well. Not a lot of money, admittedly, but as I’ve talked about before, it shouldn’t make any given the odds stacked against it.

This is the transition in thinking that writing demands: income earned from assets is frequently asynchronous. It comes long after the initial work is done, and it can continue to earn money for a really long time.

The trick is building enough assets and making sure they’re valuable enough to add up to a viable business.

There are lots of ways to do this. Each new book makes your other books more valuable. Figuring out what to read next is hard — just ask any book nerd with an overloaded TBR shelf who still buys new books — so finding an author you love with a deep backlist is an incredibly valuable thing.

Winning awards and getting excellent reviews increase the cultural value of your work. So does building up a reading community or fan group, since reading is frequently a social activity and past a certain level of competence the “big success” of a book is community driven (I talk about this a lot in the Short Fiction Lab #1 essay on success).

But a lot of this is also out of your control. The publishing industry is full of massive successes that were, for lack of a better term, the result of things coming together in the right way at the right time.

Take L. J. Smith’s The Vampire Diaries, for example. The first novel came out in 1991 with moderate success. In 2009 it became a hot property because conditions had primed the entertainment world to look for vampire-oriented teen romance stories, courtesy of the breakout success of Twilight.

Suddenly the books are selling again—and being expanded beyond the original trilogy—and The Vampire Diaries is about to become a TV series that runs for 8 seasons and has a bunch of spin-offs.

Is the book a better book than it was in 1991? No, but the story as an asset is infinitely more valuable than it was back then. Certainly popular enough to turn a finished trilogy into an ongoing series.

Which is where the added wrinkle of making money from writing — and particularly fiction writing — comes in.

You invest time in creating assets.

Those assets will not be paid out in a synchronous, predictable manner.

And the long-term value of those assets is often hard to gauge at the start of your career, because you don’t know when (or if) certain assets will take off. Nobody involved in publishing the novel in 1991 knew there would be a major hunger for vampire stories in 2009.

So you start your career flying blind, hoping everything pays off down the line.

Even as you build up those assets and they provide a relatively predictable amount of income, they don’t provide it consistently. There will be good months and bad months.

There are stretches where hard-boiled urban fantasy is hot, and your assets related to it sell like hotcakes, then stretches where it’s dead. Sometimes you sell a bunch of reprints to short stories; other times, you can’t sell a story to save your life.

One reason writers—and, particularly, Indies who rely on backlist sales—advocate for having a deep backlist is its ability to insulate you against the fluctuations of the market.

The more diverse your assets are, the more opportunities you have to leverage your assets and take advantage of the ebbs and flows.

Why am I talking so much about assets when I started this newsletter talking about infrastructure?

Many of the infrastructure elements I’m re-arranging this week — newsletter set-ups, websites with stores attached, design and social media tools — are used to make book-based assets more valuable.

The challenge is that the costs associated with those tools typically accrue synchronously. A website costs $X amount of money to run each year. A newsletter system costs $Y amount of money each month.

In other words, your asynchronous income is unpredictable and chaotic, but your outgoings will be regular as clockwork.

Many writers don’t notice this because they have other, synchronous income streams underwriting their creative work. A regular paycheck from a day job, for example.

If the writing is underperforming for a month when a newsletter bill comes due, they can cover expenses from the synchronous income stream instead of the writing. So long as the money works out over a twelve-month period, everything works out.

But So Long is the challenge.

If you don’t have a synchronous income stream that will cover those expenses, you need to plan ahead. You need to look at the boom months, where every asset sells big, as a way of building up a war chest that keeps your infrastructure running, and stock money away to keep your bills paid during the months when things are slow.

That doesn’t come naturally to anyone who has spent the bulk of their life in a synchronous work-to-income environment. It’s why people look at writing and quail in fear at the possibility of making money.

It’s sure as heck why writers get themselves in trouble when they first transition to full-time writing.

And the thing is, I know all this. I’ve been writing for thirty-odd years now, and most of that time I’ve split my time between short-term or part-time gigs with relatively synchronous payment systems and asynchronous asset generation in the form of books and stories.

I still get caught out. In particular, last year, I got lazy. I had a few steady synchronous freelance gigs that paid me like clockwork. I could predict how much money was going into my account, and knew I could cover tools like websites and newsletter fees without planning for them.

On the plus side, this allowed me to take some big swings to add more value to assets.

Some of those worked out. More of them did not.

The problem is, it also allowed me to take my eye off the ball. I didn’t have to plan for anything because I knew I had any shortfall covered. Which means when one of those synchronous payment gigs wrapped up in late April, I wasn’t adequately prepared.

I went from being 70% synchronous work/30% leveraging asynchronous assets to 25% synchronous gigs to 75% leveraging asynchronous assets.

Suddenly, all the slow months at the start of the financial year hurt, because my asset sales did not cover the cost of the systems that supported my assets.

Another round of slow months would hurt me far worse, because I no longer had the synchronous income to cover the costs.

I might have had four months of sales where Brain Jar Press and GenrePunk Books were doing the best they’ve ever done, but that wasn’t enough to cover the losses from the eight months prior to that.

If the next twelve months followed the pattern of the last twelve months, my business was in deep shit.

Thing is, I’ve been here before. And I know exactly what to do.

I recommended Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First​ last week because I re-read it just prior to making all my big changes to websites and newsletter systems.

I first picked it up in 2020, when Brian Jar Press boomed unexpectedly, and working through it allowed me to run at a profit for the first time since launching in 2017.

I stayed running at a profit until 2024, when I’d taken my eye off the ball to focus on other things.

So now I’m going through the system again. I re-read Profit First and let it serve as my guide about what worked and what doesn’t. Using the advice to assess my business expenses, rebuild my account system, and prepare for a period where I have to focus on asynchronous profit generation.

I let Michalowicz’s system guide decisions about what stayed and what went, what I could afford to do, and how I’d run the next twelve months.

A lot of my infrastructure choices make things cheaper, and leverage assets better. Will my personal website be less fancy? Absolutely. But it also forces me to strip the website back to the three core things I want and need it to do.

Will the Brian Jar Press site be different from what it was? Indeed! But I found an absolute deal on website hosting and cut my website costs by 60% every year for the next three years. Plus, the site will run faster, with some other perks mixed in.

I’m pretty sure everything will be better than it was, but here is the absolute curse of asynchronous profit generation via assets.

It’s a risk.

It’s always a risk.

And human being are risk averse. We’re genetically wired to preserve what we have. We would rather not lose $150 than earn $200.

So of course I’m nervous as heck this week, because my brain is immediately panicking about the prospect of losing the gains made using my current set-up.

It does not help that the benefits of the new set-up still sit on the far end of a whole bunch of work, and if there’s one thing our brains hate worse than risk, it’s spending energy on something that might not pay off.

But the truth is, that’s writing.

Lots of people equate it with gambling, because so much of what we do is outside of our control.

I don’t really hold with that. There is luck involved in a writing career, but you control how many times you roll the dice. You can’t control what sells, but you can control what you put out into the world, how many risks you take, and how you build your profile as a writer.

The real perk of writing is just how many things pay off when you’ve been running for a while. Stories that are worth very little when you first write them pick up readers.

Creating the story takes time, but leveraging an asset you’ve already created can take no time at all. There are short stories that have made me hundreds of dollars in reprint fees because I spent five seconds typing an email.

Each new asset is worth slightly more than the one before either, and every elevation brings the total value of what you create up.

When my nerves get the better of me, this is what I focus on.

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The post THE BIG CHALLENGE: SYNCHRONUS INFRASTRUCTURE FEES VS ASYNCHRONUS WORK appeared first on Peter M. Ball.