on The Book Designer:
Many writers, especially first-timers, wait until they have finished writing the entire book before they give any thought to the marketing of it. I argue this is backwards—the time to think through the marketing aspect of your book is before you begin writing.
Writing a novel is no different than building a widget—you want to make sure that you build into it only those features that customers want, and obviously the best time to understand this is before you start building it. If you don’t take into consideration user needs, you’ll end up either rebuilding it or selling very few of them. The same goes for writing a novel.
It’s not easy for most of us right-brained people to be good at both creative writing and marketing, but if we consider writing books to be a business—which we must do if we want to be financially successful at it—then we have to step out of our artistic comfort zone and think about the business side of things, especially if we plan on making a living from our writing.
