It’s hard to get excited about infrastructure when you’re a writer. For one thing, our infrastructure needs are pretty basic when we start out, to the point where it’s almost invisible. As we grow, those same infrastructural needs accumulate slowly and operate in the background.

Of course, there’s also the broader social problem of writers being encouraged not to think of themselves as a small business because what we do is art, not commerce. Most writers realise the business requires both too late, and their haphazard infrastructure is what they run with.

Personally, I learned about infrastructure because I started applying for small business grants and mentorships with Brian Jar Press. To fill out forms, I needed to describe the business infrastructure of the press and the various strengths and weaknesses.

Invariably, when I handed these over and talked to mentors about it, they’d look down the list and frown. “Is that it?”

I’d assure them it was.

“That doesn’t seem like a lot for the profit projection.”

I assured them it was fine. They’d express their doubts and suggest we monitor things once the mentorship started, but it was rare that the infrastructure caused a problem. Only once was there a legitimate, long-term issue (my Mac laptop broke, which killed my ability to produce ebooks because the business-critical software on it didn’t have an easy-to-transition to PC equivalent. I’ve since bought a backup Mac). 

In this context, business infrastructure refers to the physical, technological, and social assets that serve as the foundation of a business and allow it to scale (or limit its growth). The stuff that both enables your business, but also limits your capacity. 

In non-writing businesses, this can encompass the offices and warehouses a company uses, the computer networks, data back-ups, waste disposal systems, hiring practices, management protocols, and more. These often exist within a broader social infrastructure, predicated on government choices about transport, health, and other details.

These shape your business.

Some businesses are notably infrastructure-heavy. Manufacturing, for example, needs a huge outlay to acquire the machines and the workforce that keeps things running. It requires storage space and shipping logistics and other large-scale infrastructural choices.

Some businesses are infrastructure-light. Writing at its most basic is incredibly light on infrastructure. I started my writing career with a cheap notepad, a pencil, a borrowed computer and printer, and a couple of stamps. That’s all I needed to write and revise a story, and submit it for the first time.

These days, you don’t even need stamps.

Compared to starting even a simple small business, like a craft stall selling hand-printed art, the infrastructure needs are minimal. These days, I don’t even need to buy stamps as long as I’ve got a link to the internet (and the modern world has made it near impossible to exist without being online in some form).

Even as my career picked up speed, my infrastructure remained pretty minimal:

Internet access

Notebooks for brainstorming

Cheap laptop with a word processor

A website for hosting information about my work.

Social media accounts.

That was enough to sell fifty short stories and a couple of short books. There were expenses—internet access isn’t cheap in Australia, and website hosting cost a bundle—but it was still under $1,000 a year to run my business if I didn’t pay for a dedicated writing space.

But just because your infrastructure is simple—or cheap—doesn’t mean that it doesn’t affect your business. 

A few years ago, I moved in with my spouse for the first time, squeezing both our belongings into a cheap one-bedroom flat. One thing we noticed quickly: my writing is loud.

For years, I’d been using old-school mechanical keyboards with individual switches under each key. I loved those fuckers because they’re tactile and durable and you know you’ve hit each key. But I also learned to touch-type at the start of my writing career, and I type fast. 

Around 90-odd words a minute when transcribing a pre-written. Double that when I’m pulling words out of my head and producing a story. Do that on a mechanical keyboard, and it’s much like sitting next to a machine gun trying to take down a helicopter. 

This isn’t great when the person you live with, in a tiny space, wants to watch TV, or concentrate on their book, or wants to have a bit of peace and quiet after a long day’s work. It’s seriously bad when said person suffers migraine aura and loud, clattering noise is a constant searing pain.

The most practical solution to the problem was buying a new keyboard. Something quieter. So, I did a bunch of research and picked up a scissor-switch keyboard. Slimmer, low profile, and most importantly—quieter. I still needed to muffle the thing from time to time, but it was great. 

I could type while my spouse was home without fear!

Within weeks, my writing progress tanked. I didn’t write when I should have been, and when I wrote, I produced far fewer words than expected. 

I pay close attention to days when I feel like I’m falling behind, because it’s usually a sign I’m not managing my anxiety the way I should, so I started working through my system to figure out what was wrong. I did a whole bunch of self-care work, then went back and reviewed my notes around each writing day.

This time, the problem wasn’t anxiety. It was the new keyboard. Apparently, when typing at high speed, I wasn’t hitting the Shift key right because the scissor switches there were temperamental. They wanted me to hit the key dead centre, but years of high-speed typing on far more rugged keyboards left me with a bad habit of touching the very edge of the key.

And because I wasn’t hitting that key right, I either slowed down to fix more errors (ugh!) or left them and had to spend more time fixing errors at the end of the draft (double ugh!).

My subconscious brain, ever the problem solver, realised I could avoid all that extra work by just…not finishing projects. Writing wasn’t paying my rent in this era, so the adverse effects of not getting things done on my personal deadlines were minimal, so why create more work for myself? There was other stuff I could focus on in those hours that was less frustrating.

It seemed a stupid reason to avoid write, and it is. But I’ve been here before. Our brains are problem solving machines, and if you’re not paying attention to the real problem, they’ll go with the simplest solution.

If writing is frustrating, don’t write. Easy. 

Ergo, when infrastructure isn’t working for you, the best thing to do is change the infrastructure and see how it affects things. 

So I bought another keyboard. Still quiet, but with a different design, and a shift key that worked.

Within days, the problem went away. I was producing stories at the speed I expected, and they fit into the editing hours allocated to them.

It cost me an extra $200 for that keyboard, but once it allowed me to finish two or three stories that year, that extra cost was covered and I was better placed to write more for years to come. 

Of course, my infrastructure needs are simple anymore. Once you tack publishing books and running a web store onto the business of writing, your infrastructure needs expand. 

These days, I don’t just need a website — I need the store software and various plugins to optimise it and methods of shipping and tracking books. I need design software so I can create book covers, and access to stock art, and font licenses, and storage for all the books we ship.

We’re preparing to move in December/January of this year, and I’m quietly excited because the new place has storage space and a home office. A simple infrastructure shift, but it changes my business model. 

Suddenly I can move from doing really short print runs (20 to 50 books) to discounted runs of 100 to 200 copies of a new release, earning more money per book. I can organise afternoon and evening meetings without feeling like I’m imposing on my partner (my office shares space with our living room).

On the other hand, I have a tech stack that costs a great deal of money to run every month. I’ve just done my preliminary tax paperwork for the Australian financial year, which ends in June, and looked at what everything is costing, what’s working, and what isn’t.

Ergo, there are changes coming to the website. Some of it is the site getting a little long in the tooth (my current website is 18 years old this year and has four or five distinct looks). 

Some of it is slowly increasing costs on the tech front. Running a store, for example, comes with a monthly cost. To break even on just being online, I need to sell nearly 35 to 40 books across Brain Jar Press and GenrePunk Books.

In good months, that’s not a problem. The stores do a pretty brisk trade when I’m actively promoting and running newsletters.

But the problem isn’t the good months. Selling books was an uphill battle during the US elections last year, and has become an uphill battle again now that US politics are a twenty-four seven spectacle. As a writer and a publisher, I trade on attention. 

The basic promise of a book is, “Give this a few hours of your attention, and it will provide valuable information or entertainment.”

When folks feel like they need to fix their attention on the news, for fear they’ll miss something that’s about to turn their life upside down, there’s just less attention going around that can be monetised by fiction.

It doesn’t help that the six months where people had spare attention, my time was occupied by cyclones, holes in walls, and wrangling the strata committee of our apartment block to get things repaired (seven months of the walls leaking every time it rains and counting. Things are finally moving in the right direction, though).

On top of that, I made some big swings over the last year to two that hadn’t panned out the way I expected. Splitting GenrePunk Books and Brian Jar Press has a lot of upsides to it, but it presents infrastructure problems. 

My GenrePunk Books newsletter gains readers at about three times the speed of Brain Jar Press, for example, because there are things I can do with my fiction (giveaways, newsletter promo deals) that I wouldn’t do with someone else’s.

Meanwhile, Brian Jar Press books sell better once a new customer has found the store, because there are a lot of options and a lot of brilliant authors there and, frankly, most of them have a lot more prestige than I do.

Splitting the stores meant I increased my infrastructure costs by 50 to 60%, but left both stores weaker. GenrePunk gets more new readers, but has less to sell them. Brain Jar Press sells more books to the current readers but is slower to acquire new customers.

The split also didn’t have the effect I hoped for—almost everyone continued to refer to GenrePunk Books releases as Brian Jar Press releases, anyway. The two imprints are intertwined in most folks’ heads. 

Given time, I could probably get the distinction to catch on, but that’s a trick to pull when the finances aren’t as close to the bone right now. 

So while I’m keeping the newsletters separate, part of my shift is moving both imprints over to the same store and the same newsletter system. This will make it easier to double down on some strategies that are working (mentioning Brain Jar books in the GenrePunk opening newsletter) and generating sales for both imprints. 

It’s not ideal, but it keeps both companies running on what has been a pretty lean year on the publishing front. It also lets my personal website go back to being a blog, which I’ve missed, and decanters my writing from being exclusively a self-published thing as I switch up my strategy on that front. 

Switching websites and systems is a big job. It’ll take me about three weeks, during which I’ll be setting aside my writing time to get it all done. The upfront cost of doing it is going to hurt, especially given how lean my yearly profit has been.

It will also drop the yearly cost of running both sides to a third of what I’m currently paying, making every book I sell a little more profitable (and, coincidentally, bringing my break-even point down to what we’ve been selling over the last twelve months).

So, like swapping my keyboard out for something that works better, the logic is simple: the short-term cost of doing this will help keep my business running long-term, and set up a business infrastructure that makes it easier to grow.

Chanigng my websites  isn’t the only infrastructure change I’ve made over the last twelve months, just the largest. I make it a point to check on things every three months, looking at every aspect of my business and asking questions about what could make things better. 

Earlier this year, I noticed my projections were way off and realised we had a problem with shipping (it was three times more expensive than I’d projected, because my brain was still back in 2022). Three months before that, I cut back on a piece of software that was useful, but not essential enough to justify the yearly expense. 

I suspect, three months from now, I’ll be squinting at one of my key software subscriptions (adobe) and debating whether it’s time to switch to an alternative. 

At every step, I look at the physical infrastructure too: is my desk layout working for me? Could I change the books within easy reach of my desk and speed up what I do? Do any computer components need replacing? I recently upgraded my mouse after realizing my old model was getting long in the tooth, and I was resisting doing covers because the mouse hiccuped.

Admittedly, I didn’t learn to do this in isolation. A big part of thinking this way came from reading Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First (recommended to any writer) and Profit First for Ecommerce (recommended to any writer running their own web store). 

Thinking about your infrastructure as part of the flow of profit and loss in your business is incredibly valuable, and I credit Michalowicz’s book with transforming Brain Jar Press from a hobby to a small profit-earning business in the space of a few weeks. 

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