Hello and welcome back to my blog.

Today I am going to write about commercial writing. I don’t mean TV or radio commercials I mean writing to make money in fiction.

I got the idea for this article from an article I found on this website here:

And in many ways I agree with the writer of the article. I remember years ago in reading a guitar magazine interview with Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian about commercialism in music and it in many ways mirrors my thoughts on commercialism in writing fiction and publishing.

To summarize the interview Scott Ian had said if you sign a record contract with a record company you are a corporate rack band. In order for you to not be a commercially oriented musician you have to charge nothing for your music or at least charge only what it costs you to make the album.

In my opinion the same is true when it comes to writing anything whether it be fiction or non fiction or whatever the case might be. The moment you sign a publishing deal with a publishing company you have become a corporate author.

Even if you’re an independent author who self published a book to Amazon’s Kindle or Smashwords, or Draft 2 Digital or whatever the case might be you are still a corporate author. The only way, in my opinion, you can claim to not be a corporate author is if you sell your books from your own website and nowhere else.

And further to the idea of commercialism is this, once you start charging more than nothing for your books you are a commercially oriented author. Everybody who charges money for their books is in it to make money, myself included.

Now before you get into a snit and call me crass or only interested in money, my main focus is to write books that entertain people and people can have fun reading, and to make money. But my books have to be good in order for you to be willing to part with your money. Of course that’s a no brainer.

My attitude towards money is that it’s a tool. It is not the most important thing in the world to me, far from it. But money is a tool that is used to support things that are important, like being able to pay the mortgage, buy food and I’m sure you get the picture.

Also one of my goals is to be able to make enough money to be able to sponsor ten children through World Vision. I am currently sponsoring one.

Like Tim Ferris said in The 4 Hour Workweek “Having a lot of money reveals who you really are when you no longer have to be nice.”

Or another quote who I can’t remember at this time who said this but “Having more money makes you more of what you already are.”

So there’s my thoughts on it have a good day.