Business Feedback - Hannah Sole

 Feedback

I asked one of the Creative Writing teachers for feedback regarding how my business runs and whether or not it would be financially viable. I asked a list of 5 questions for her to answer, these questions being the following:

• Could my business reasonably make a profit?
• Would many people be interested in purchasing my services?
• Would this business model overwork me/be realistic?
• Would the business be expensive to maintain/run?
• Is my business obsolete? (in the sense of many other businesses doing the same thing)

After asking these questions, I received the following feedback from Hannah:

"This does sound interesting. There are a couple of businesses that do versions of this with children’s books, though these personalisations tend to be minor (eg using a child’s name in a story), so this sounds a bit different to that. You might want to target specific gifting markets (Christmas, Valentines, anniversaries, kids’ birthdays) to broaden your customer base, with maybe a range of options for customers. Eg, do they want a standard short story with a few details changed to make it relate to specific people / places / events, or a bespoke story from scratch. You could have a sliding scale of prices for this.

 

Make sure you set realistic prices for the market and for your time. Freelance writing rates tend not to be a large amount, but this is normally non fiction, so it’s difficult to get a direct comparison. You might want to look at freelance artists to see what their standard commission rates are for bespoke pieces.

 

Is this intended to be print or e-book? This will have an impact on your costs. Prints are more expensive per copy when you don’t have a large run of them, so personalised prints would be more costly.

 

Something else to consider is audio versions of your short stories as well, which might involve additional costs if you need a voice-over actor to do an audio reading. There are programmes that can convert text to a podcast for free, so that might be worth looking at too.

 

This is a good way to build a portfolio up and to think about short story publishing in general. Print publishing deals for short stories are notoriously difficult to get, so if this is your favourite type of text to write, this is a nice way forward!"

From this feedback, I can infer that my business is filling in a niche that isn't commonly touched upon by businesses; most bespoke writing services are aimed towards children rather than young adults, which gives my business a unique area to look at. She also suggested a business model where I have different 'options' such as a story following a formula with minor personalisations or a completely bespoke story. These are good ideas that I hadn't thought of beyond just obtaining a brief from my client, and is something I am going to consider for my business (mostly as something I'd put on the layout of the website).

Hannah also wanted to make sure that I set my prices to a reasonable range, which is something I was already considering (around the £10-20 range depending on the wishes of my customer). She also asked whether or not my business would use prints, which could impact the costs of producing the stories as it would be more expensive. I hadn't entirely thought of this mostly due to having been set on E-Books from day one of setting up the enterprise idea. 

Another bit of feedback was something I had considered before I even sent the email; audiobooks. She considered whether or not I could do audiobooks for my business as well, mentioning that they may incur additional costs. I hadn't thought of these additional costs, although there are some that I can avoid (such as voicing the stories myself), but I cannot avoid having to purchase things like a good quality microphone or access to an audio-editing software.

All in all, this feedback confirmed that I was going the right way to take my business forward and that there were a few missed opportunities regarding my business that I could take if I noticed them. Additionally, this feedback enlightened me to a few areas where I may end up needing to pay additional costs (primarily the audiobooks), which could impact how I price my services if it ends up being a recurring cost.