Write Like an Artist, Think Like an Entrepreneur

How Adopting a Business Mindset Transformed My Writing Career

If you Googled me six months ago, you would have gotten a hit or two with some poems I published back in college or been directed to my messy LinkedIn profile, but you certainly would not have gleaned any information about my writing career. Yet over the past six months, I have secured not only a respectable Substack following but also a robust social media platform that has established me in the online world as a writer.

I get lots of questions about how I’ve grown my Substack and social media presence to where it is today, and even more astonished questions when I say I did it in just six months. Because I am a writer, a digression is in order.

My favorite childhood anecdote is how I used to stay back during recess in pre-school dictating stories to my teacher when all the other kids were out playing hopscotch or four square. While this unorthodox practice undoubtedly stunted my interpersonal growth (I really didn’t figure out how to talk to people until I got to college, though this is probably still a significant milestone given that most writers don’t know how to talk to anyone even far into adulthood), it allowed me to practice my craft from the age of three and to be certain of what I wanted in life by the time I hit the fourth grade; nine-year-old Liza was dead set on becoming a writer and doing everything that it took to get there.

So you can only imagine the frustration I felt as I got older and was hit with the realization that not only was it impractical to be a full-time writer but also that writing itself was a supposedly useless endeavor. Like Gil Pender from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, I lamented that I was not born a hundred years earlier, when writers roamed the Parisian cafes and the novel was at its peak as an art form, and wondered what I was even doing writing novels in the twenty-first century. I talk a lot these days about the throes of querying, but I was at it as early as high school for the first novel I wrote when I was about fifteen. Obviously, I had no idea how to write a query letter back then, and I am sure that it would embarrass me now to dig up whatever I sent to agents in the 11th grade, but I’ve always been fascinated by the novel and was adamant about making a name for myself as early as high school. Yet after receiving many rejections from agents for my less-than-perfect query ten years ago, something in me shut down, and for the next ten years, I lost some of the go-getter spirit that had fueled my early writing career. I had always been taught that hard work and dedication were the secret to success, yet the more I wrote, the more I became convinced that this formula did not hold up in the literary world: I was consistently putting my work out there, but no one was biting.

Thus I surrendered myself to the worst possible fate that can befall a writer: I lost hope.

What I didn’t understand as a teenager was that though I might have been a damn good writer for sixteen, I stood no chance competing against fifty-year-old women who had been honing their craft their entire lives (I say women because, as we figured out here, men are often excluded from the publishing world). I thought that it was impossible to break into any literary spaces, so, for the next ten years or so, writing became a deeply private endeavor for me. Don’t get me wrong—I was still writing, and writing a hell of a lot. Over those ten years, I completed two additional novels and enough poems to fill three collections. At times, I even experienced a dim spark of hope that compelled me to renew my attempt at putting myself out there—until my work was again met with crickets, and the spark died out. I even tried to query the second of the two novels that I wrote, MAN A MUSEUM, and was dealt the same set of rejections I had faced in high school. I had published three poetry collections, but outside of my circle of close friends and family, no one was reading them. The barriers to entry seemed impossibly high, and by the time I graduated college, I had practically renounced my dream of becoming a writer, focusing instead on starting up a company—my college consulting firm, Invictus Prep.

Don’t worry guys—everything I do is poetry-inspired.

Suddenly, something changed in me. In college, I was prone to spells of depression fueled by the dread I faced when it came to my career. I was envious of my friends who held a genuine interest in medicine or coding—talents that lent themselves to a defined professional trajectory—yet could not imagine my own life in their shoes—a life bereft of writing. So when I started a company and things quickly began to work out, I was shocked: I witnessed, for the first time in my life, what it was like to have hard work pay off, and my rage against the world quickly dissipated. Unlike the publishing sphere, where countless hours of writing led absolutely nowhere, the world of entrepreneurship was infinitely more straightforward: the more hours I spent meeting with parents or advertising our services, the more clients we signed on, and the faster the company grew—the results I reaped were directly proportional to the amount of work I put in. Fueled by this newfound entrepreneurial spirit, I built a company from the ground up and found immense fulfillment in a world that yielded rewards for hard work. From that moment on, I became an entrepreneur.

So for the next several years, I set my dream of being a writer aside. I spent my days building up the company and was ecstatic to inhabit a world where I could look back and witness tangible progress—unlike my ridiculously static writing career, my company was growing. Suddenly, I was out-earning my friends in STEM with just my English degrees, and for the first time in my life, I felt stable and happy rather than frustrated and tired. I had always reserved a certain ire for the publishing industry, which gave me absolutely nothing to work with after countless hours of writing, and now, transitioning to an industry where my hard work hypothesis finally held true, I only grew more jaded with the writing world. So I began to shift my sights away from publishing, telling myself that it was not worth the constant vexation. It was not worth spending countless hours writing when no one was going to read my stuff.

But lodged somewhere in the back of my mind was the dream that had once blossomed within me during those odd pre-school recess periods. Despite my entrepreneurial feats, somewhere deep inside, I still wanted to be a writer.

Nevertheless, I felt a certain joy at the idea of being an entrepreneur. The snide looks I got from people at parties when I introduced myself as an English major and aspiring writer morphed into gazes of respect when I began to tell people that I owned a company. My thriving financial situation was a welcome change of pace from the terror I’d experienced for years when it came to planning how I proposed to support myself as a writer—it also gave me the peace of mind to think clearly for the first time in my life. I knew I was a damn good writer (I had never really experienced anything akin to imposter syndrome; my frustration arose, rather, from the opacity of what it took to succeed in the writing space), and I knew I was a damn good entrepreneur. The first didn’t seem to be working for me—I wrote copious amounts of words on a daily basis that no one ever read—yet the second had propelled me to unimagined heights: I was an expert at branding, marketing, positioning, organization, outreach, and many other petty endeavors I had never imagined would make a consistent appearance in my life. In three short years, I had figured out how to create a profitable business with zero prior business experience, and it was working.

So what if I could do the same for writing?

Sifting through my scattered unpublished essays and rejected novel drafts, I began to reflect on what had worked in starting up and running my business: marketing aggressively, creating a social media presence, pitching our idea in the most inopportune places, bothering people who did not ask to be bothered, and organizing growth plans to the point of absurdity. There was a certain insanity to running a business, and if I didn’t push constantly every day, I would have never gotten anywhere. Things were different when it came to my writing career: I spent the bulk of my energy writing, but aside from spamming literary agents and journals, I was not doing much on the outreach front. I needed to get my writing out there, but what I was doing wasn’t working.

So I created a brand—Pens and Poison—to reflect the vision I had always had for my work: unlike many young female writers, I was not an edgy emo creator, so I used welcoming and soothing brand colors; on the other hand, my writing often touched on controversial themes, so I needed a bit of spice in the name—that was where the “poison” aspect came into play. From there, I started up a YouTube channel and an Instagram account. Just putting my writing out there wasn’t working, so I needed another way to reel people in. So I started making videos about topics in literature that fascinated me, and soon enough, I had amassed quite a respectable following on both Instagram and YouTube under the Pens and Poison umbrella. From there, I ran my writing career like a business: I hired an assistant to help me with all Pens and Poison related ventures and sought out interns to refine our marketing strategy. I focused on branding and positioning, identifying the specific aspects of my intellectual life that my audience liked to see in both my video and written content and adjusted from there. Soon enough, people were going to my website, purchasing my poetry books, and reading my articles.

Liza discusses The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot on YouTube

Once I had secured a hefty following on social media, I set up my Substack, migrating my existing mailing list in hopes of securing an even larger readership. I had a small audience—about a hundred or so people—who consistently read my work, and I became more motivated to put out more writing with every new subscriber. On Substack, I could write on my own terms without an editor censoring every other idea I thought up, and I could control exactly when and how I wanted to release my next piece. My essay Leave Literature Alone soon blew up the Internet, with well-known writers and journalists approaching me to commend me for my work and to inspire me to keep on writing. Within several months, I had thousands of subscribers and the renewed energy I needed to try to put my work out there again.

I was finally a writer.

I’m still querying my novel THE LILAC ROOM in hopes of securing an agent. I’m still frustrated at the seemingly-impossible barriers to entry of traditional publishing, but I have a name for myself as a writer now, and in certain tiny circles, my writing has gained traction. I spend almost every moment of my free time writing articles for Substack and other journals, and I am proud to say that my work is finally being read (and if you’re reading this right now, you’ve helped me make my dream possible). I’m still on the road to my lifelong dream to become a published novelist, but with many literary agents now expressing interest in my work, I know that I am close to success.

So how did my life change so drastically over the course of six months after ten years of repeatedly banging my head against the wall? The publishing industry is indeed nebulous, frustrating, and, in many ways, unfair. But that doesn't mean that you can’t succeed as a writer. What I’ve noticed in many writers is an aversion to the idea of marketing, branding, positioning, and business; most writers will tell you that their writing is a craft, an art form that has no business encroaching on the world business. And trust me—I understand better than anyone where that sentiment comes from; heck, that used to be my exact line of thought. But isolating yourself from the real world and hoping that success will come from cold-emailing editors will not, in most cases, get you where you need to be.

I’m not suggesting that you abandon everything to become a businessperson or to treat your writing completely as a venture—we’re writers, after all! We’re not trained as business people or salespeople. We don’t know how to sell a product or how to shove our noses in other people’s business. But what most writers lack today is an entrepreneurial mindset, and if I’ve learned anything from straddling both the literary and the entrepreneurial world, it’s that we writers could stand to learn a thing or two from our entrepreneurial friends. Borrowing just a few business tactics—marketing, outreach, and organization—will go a long way in your writing career.

Like it or not, we live in a self-made, entrepreneurial world. So don’t chase that email telling you that your work was just accepted for publication in The New York Times. Make yourself known to the universe so that, eventually, those emails will chase you.