Digital Book

In the broad spectrum of entrepreneurial activity, the writing business occupies a special place. It does not need offices, machines, equipment, personnel, or all other means of production; the main resource in literary labor is the author's intellect, knowledge, imagination, and creativity.
It should be noted that for the overwhelming majority of people, writing is too much strain on their emotional and intellectual energies. Writing even one or two pages for them - a mere punishment.
The complete opposite is people with pronounced literary ability, with a special taste for writing. For them, literary creativity, writing poems, novels, novellas or articles - not only work, but also self-expression, the desire to convey to others their feelings, thoughts, images.
The need to communicate with the reader, in self-realization and free creativity leads authors to literary work in many different genres - poetry, fiction, drama, in the writing of novels, articles, detective stories, educational and popular science literature, screenplays, children's books.
Very often it happens that authors write for themselves, "in the desk," realizing their writing talent in a private, private way. In this case, writing does not go beyond a hobby and intellectual pastime. A writer's leisure time becomes a business when the author has his own readership, with its own preferences, tastes and needs. The reader's demand and the author's supply meet, helped by markets that can take various forms - paper-based and audio-visual (see Figure 1).
Literary labor begins to become a writer's business as the author has his or her own consumer, his or her own readership, ready to pay for the writer's product, whether it be novels, poems, memoirs, plays, or screenplays. But even when a publisher is willing to pay for an author's literary work, albeit a small amount of money, it is also a full-fledged enterprise. Thus, we can divide the buyers of an author's product into two large segments:
The author writes for a wide range of readers, i.e., the end consumers. This type of relationship in entrepreneurship is commonly referred to as "business to consumer" or B2C;
The author writes for intermediate consumers, which are business structures that recycle and refine the writing product, give it a different form, adjust the content. This is particularly the case with screenwriters, playwriters, and computer game writers, who do not write for end consumers (although this is also possible), but for film companies, theaters, and computer firms. Such entrepreneurial activity is classified as "business to business," B2B.
The literary path can be the main activity of the author or combined with other work. Much depends on the income from the writing business - if it is significant (like Joanne Rowling, who became a billionaire after writing and selling Harry Potter books), the writer can focus only on his or her work. If the income from the writing business is small, the author tends to combine literary work with journalism, translation, teaching, employment, and other activities.
Authors enter the writing business in different ways. Some write poems and novels at an early age, others join it on duty - as, for example, researchers, and others start writing at a mature or advanced age, when there is free time for reflection, analysis, memories. Thus, memoirs, historical and military chronicles, accounts of contemporaries, encounters, and events appear on the book market.
Often talented authors never embark on the path of commercialization of literary work because of modesty, fear of ridicule, because of high competition in the literary markets, or because of initial rejections by publishers. Many aspiring authors feel that their work is not sophisticated enough, the language is simple and vulgar, and the plots are trivial and uninteresting. At this stage, writers are encouraged by the praise of acquaintances and relatives, they become less mistrustful and gradually gain self-confidence.
It should be noted that the competition in the writing business in almost all segments is really serious - in Russia alone, more than 100,000 titles are published per year. And this despite the fact that readers in our country each year is becoming less and less. According to surveys, about 35% of the population of the Russian Federation does not read books at all. An equal number of people do it occasionally.