The Business of Writing: Administration
5. Administration - This is the overall organization of people and processes, including everything from office management to the human resources department.
For writers, Administration covers most of the day-to-day tasks of making and tracking submissions, answering mail, returning email and phone calls, filing, organizing manuscripts, maintaining the web site and blog, and so on. This is where the famous Secretary Hat goes - the job of logging submissions and rejections and then getting the manuscript back in the mail.
Administration, like Finance, is often considered dull, unglamorous, and downright boring. It generally involves a lot of paperwork and organization, which puts a lot of folks off. But like Finance, Administration is something no business can do without. The most obvious part is the aforementioned getting the manuscript in the mail - as I've said before, editors do not do house-to-house searches for publishable manuscripts. If Admin doesn't get the manuscript out, the story won't get published.
There are, however, a lot more ways in which Admin is important. Keeping track of submissions, for instance - you probably don't want six novels all sitting at the same publishing house at the same time, even if it is your first choice of publisher. You certainly don't want to forget that this story was rejected by Editor A at Publisher A three years ago, and send it back as a "new" submission. You may want to keep track of which markets respond promptly and which take years, or which places have bought more (or paid more for) particular types of stories.
You also don't want to lose track of how long things have been under submission - there's a point at which you really ought to query the publishing house to find out if the ms. got lost somewhere in the process, and that point is neither six days nor six years after you mailed it off. You don't want the email from the agent or the prospective editor to sit unanswered in your "in" basket for a week. You want your files and data entry up to date in whatever system you have, so that if and when somebody asks whether you own the Portuguese language e-book rights for a story you published twenty years ago, you can look it up without spending hours and hours digging through old piles of paper, only to discover that the contract you're after seems to have vanished.
Administration can also cover a lot of miscellaneous and occasional jobs, like travel agent, monitoring and reordering office supplies, mailing out ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies), correspondence, keeping the library in order, finding research materials, keeping the web page current, scheduling and coordinating whatever meetings or interviews or events need to be scheduled and coordinated, etc.
In a large company or corporation, pretty much every department has its own Administration section, because every department has paperwork, phone calls, and organizing necessities. For writers (and any small business), Administration doesn't have such hard edges. Deciding what to write next is Operations; but is keeping track of the story notes and supporting research Administration or part of Operations? Deciding on a list of publishers to query is Marketing; but composing and printing the letters is probably Administration. Doing the taxes is Finance; filing the receipts and entering income and expenses into Quicken all year could be considered either Admin or Finance. Etc.
It isn't particularly important that this area be broken out from all the others. What is important is that the work gets done - submissions get tracked, manuscripts get mailed, contracts get filed, the web page gets maintained, e-mails and letters get answered, and so on.
However you choose to keep all the various records and processes, it is generally easiest to set up a good system right from the beginning. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that your early work will never get properly entered when you finally get around to it. The problem is that the earlier one is in one's writing career, the more all this tracking and record-keeping seems like overkill, or at the very least, over-optimism. And besides, it's boring and it takes time and it's boring and it takes energy and it's boring. Nevertheless, if you stay in the writing business, your future self will thank you for doing it all right from the start. Trust me on this one.
Administration also includes the Human Resources department. Since few writers have any actual employees, this covers stuff like dealing with one's agent, accountant, and any other professional services one has contracted for, plus whatever skills development one decides to invest in for oneself. "Skills development" here refers to anything that's going to help the business. Writing skills are one obvious area; one can work on them deliberately in lots of ways, from doing informal experimental bits and pieces to critique groups to attending a seminar or workshop to taking classes in grammar or whatever other area you may feel weak in.
There are, however, lots of other business-related skills that are good for a writer to develop. Basic financial management is a fairly obvious weak point for way too many people; checking the latest marketing and publicity techniques never hurts; website management changes so rapidly that it's certainly worth reading up on every year or so, and maybe even taking a brush-up class periodically. Publicity and Marketing are areas where writers tend to be at one extreme or the other: either they're naturals, or they're floundering. There are books and classes on all these things, frequently in Community Ed centers (which are usually cheaper and less time-intensive than college-level night school).
If you're starting to feel overwhelmed, I'm not surprised. I started feeling overwhelmed about two posts ago, and all I'm really doing here is describing, in categories and a bit more detail than usual, the stuff I have to do to make a living writing. Seeing it all laid out in print makes me realize just how much I and all the other pros I know are juggling all the time…and there are still two areas to go.
Next up: Public Relations.
