Continuing Education For Writers

Instead of doing what I want (writing), I had to spend much of the last three days doing my must-have-or-they-suspend-your-license continuing education online classes as a certified roofing contractor.  It's required every two years and of course, costs money.  It's mostly the same stuff, with some additional reading material on interesting (NOT) subjects like fungal growth and mewdew (isn't that a lovely word for very ugly fuzz?) in houses or the great new thing about going green (Oh yeah, many of my customers have the $$$ to install solar energy).  These things can* be googled, if the contractor were so inclined to expand his business into inspections and stuff, but noooo, somebody somewhere thought it was an excellent way to add to the governing body's coffers to charge people for extra knowledge they thought they might need.

Not saying continuing education is full of shit.

Okay, I am.  Pfffffffft.

But I won't bore you with the details.  I was just thinking, during the long, long hours of sitting through through PgRefresh-to-pretend-I'm-reading-so-they-don't-logged-me-off, what if there was continuing education for writers too?

How horrible would that be?  Or maybe, it WOULD be a good thing?

Most writers don't know how to run a self-business, don't understand the basics of taxkeeping for self-employment, and some don't even really know how the book business is run today.  I know, I know, we are all about our books, the business be damned, but if we're to know how to live with our writers' earnings, we shouldn't be just thinking about the book but our livelihood, right?

I can think of an excellent class already.  ROYALTY STATEMENTS.  How many of us can actually make heads or tails of that lovely bunch of numbers sent our way every six months?  Sure, we could sort of understand it, but do we really, really get the whole picture? I mean, my royalty statements from MIRA for Virtually His showed pretty decent numbers to me, and I was thinking that I was doing well, and then WHAM! My editor informed me that my numbers were bad because Walmart didn't stock my book and they were dropping the series. Thought about being blindsided.  AND, I'm pride myself as a pretty darn good at self-employment stuff.

So wouldn't it be cool if some BIG LIST and midlist authors gave copies of their royalty statements of a book through a couple of years, anonymously, with names and titles all blacked out, and during a workshop somebody smart and knowledgeable lead us stupid authors through the numbers? I know I'd attend that one.

I know RWA already has workshops for business topics, but not every writer belongs to RWA.  And some of the subject matters are pretty basic for a published author.

I suppose, if one really wanted to, one could educate oneself in anything.  As a roofer, though, I'm always amazed at how people think they could roof or know about it just because they read two things on roofing on Google.  Because Googling does not make one a real expert, you know that, don't you?

So, Googling all the blog topics about e-rights and e-publishing might give one a general view of the business, but it's not the same as talking to some e-authors who have hands-on experience.  When I attend a workshop, though, most of the talking goes round and round about the publishing schedule, what the editors want and vague references to payments. 

The questions are from novices and yes, that's fine, but during a continuing education class, the "teacher" could focus a step further--such as, how does one make money writing e-books? What are the formats all about anyway? Simple questions, to be sure, but you'd be surprised at how confused some people are about these things.  RWA workshops do focus on some of these areas, but the questions invariably return to "me, me, me," which isn't surprising because, of course the writer in you is just interested in the end-product.  That's why continuing education in intermediate topics is a must, I say.

How to implement this? LOL. I have no idea. The more rules, the less the creative personality likes it. But sometimes, and especially now, I suspect--at the cusp of big changes in the industry--it's necessary to know where one stands.

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