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launching your memoir business

Launching Your Memoir Business—Do What it Takes to Succeed

Before launching your memoir business, you ought to inquire about your viability to be successful. People aspire to become memoir professionals for many reasons. Among the background that you bring to the endeavor ought to be the following:

Launching Your Memoir Business — Five Areas to Assess Your Viability

1. You must be familiar with the memoir genre. Being a fiction writer or a poet or an essayist is not enough. You must have read much memoir and have written in the genre. If you have not done so yet, immerse yourself in serious memoir writing and reading.

2. You must be willing to do what it takes to launch your company. Doing your best may not cut it. You have to endeavor to succeed and not merely to try to succeed. Do you have the time now to do this? Do you have the resources to commit to this project?

3. You must study business “best practices.” Business schools have been around for over a hundred years and there is much knowledge about what makes for a successful launch. Much of it, of course, was written for big companies, but you can find ample material for micro-businesses.

4. Do you have the support of the important people in your life? They can either help you or hinder you. There are also times in one’s life when launching yet one more new venture is not a wise move for you and your family.

5. Whatever the area of memoir work you wish to devote yourself to, you must have the requisite skills to be successful. For instance, if you wish to videotape your clients to create a video memoir, you must know how to use a camera, how to edit, etc. If not, are you willing to learn these skills?

Do What it Takes to Succeed

To succeed at launching a memoir business, you must be willing to do what it takes to launch your company. Doing your best may not cut it. You have to endeavor to succeed and not merely to try to succeed. Do you have the time now to do this? Do you have the resources to commit to this project? The more thoughtful you are at the launch of your company the less likely you are to be blindsided later on.

1. Learn “Best Practices” of successful businesses. Many magazines and websites can offer you much help in creating a business. While the content of a plumbing business and of a memoir business are different, the processes are surprisingly the same. For instance, you will need to engage in marketing and in selling, you will need to provide customer services, you will need to assess profitability. Much of this is done in the same way regardless of the business.

2. Pay attention to how your company makes money. After a while, you will have had a number of clients. You must ask yourself how they heard of you. Which category of clients was most profitable? Which products are the easiest to sell? These are questions you must never cease to ask yourself.

3. Become familiar with the 80/20 Rule: 80% of your efforts only produce 20% of the results while 20% of the work you perform will generate 80% of your profit. The logical conclusion is, therefore, to always be searching for the 20% of your work and products that are supporting the company. The remaining 80% either needs to be retooled or eliminated.

4. Launching a company will be challenging. The universe will not come to your aid because you are sincere or a good person. Clear your calendar of extraneous activities for while and know that you will miss on a number of opportunities to socialize if you are to launch your business. It depends on you.

5. Do you have resources to commit to this project? It will require money–both the purchase any equipment you may need (but generally launching a memoir business is a low financial investment) and to pay yourself until the time when your company is up and running. Do you have the skill you need or do you have to learn these?

Until you have acquired the above knowledge and skills, it is perhaps a good idea to put launching your memoir business on hold.

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