Beyond the Margins: Author Entrepreneurship Beyond the Page
Beyond the Margins is a twice-monthly newsletter helping authors create enterprises they love around their books, expertise, and experience. It combines 25+ years of indie publishing and author coaching into practical business insights, strategic guidance, and a community of author entrepreneurs.
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Authors: Yes, you can
Published about 18 hours ago • 2 min read
Authors,
You can do more than you think.
Your interests, experience, and personal history... they're opportunities. With the right vision, they can be valuable offerings that generate sustainable revenue while moving you toward your author goals.
Authorpreneurship is more than a catchy buzzword — it's a way to align your personal goals with creative output, turning what you care about into services that empower and create value for others. This is one of the biggest reasons why authorpreneurship is the best way to achieve your author goals and your personal ones.
Over the years, Sharon has collected various tactics and shifts in perspective that can help you see these possibilities more intuitively and bring that intentionality into your everyday routines.
Here is a roundup from the archives that we hope helps you put these pieces into practice:
Our free monthly Zoom calls are designed for you to make more money as an author and create/refine your author business model.
Each call is one hour and combines a little bit of author business education with a lot of community support and brainstorming, personalized to your questions and challenges.
Today! (September 17):Positioning Yourself in the World of AI: The Human Preference Economy AI doesn’t make meaning or imagine—but we do. Sharon will lead an open discussion on the “Human Preference Economy,” its three main pillars, and the “micropreneur moment.” Together, we’ll brainstorm solutions to your questions and challenges in this era of AI and algorithms.
October: Author Business Bingo (Details and event link TBD)
Author Spotlight: Soul Mission Wins First place
Soul Mission's 2026 NYC Big Book Award
Congratulations to client Joshua Becker for taking first place in the Fiction-Religion category of the NYC Big Book Award! Much deserved.
Soul Mission is super-original time-traveling, spiritual, sci-fi/fantasy, speculative fiction that has a middle-age devout Jewish dad with OCD and insomnia finding himself on a series of unexpected, mostly terrifying, journeys to key points in Jewish history, perhaps with missions he doesn't fully understand: Berlitz Germany in the 1200s, a 1945 Green Bay Packers game with the first Jewish Miss America, the Holocaust, the Spanish Inquisition, 1911's Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in NYC, the David v Goliath Biblical slingshot showdown.
Soul Mission, speculative fiction novel
www.SWoodhouseBooks.com is Now Live.
Concierge book publishing for organizations, founders, and families—
built around your vision, your timeline, and your standards.
For years Sharon has offered a business and legacy book service to organizations that want to build their legacy, families that treasure their history, and businesses that have had an industry impact.
Sharon has been wanting to grow this side of her business for a while. If you know of an business or family that would benefit from a visual scrapbook, founder biography, or organizational history book, get in touch by replying to this email or emailingsharon@conspirecreative.com.
Author Business Model Worksheet, Updated
We're happy to announce a freshly updated version of our Author Business Model Worksheet. You can find it on Gumroad for free (or pay what you want):
This updated version has various formatting upgrades from the original, is up-to-date, and includes two new author income streams: investing and background and passive income.
The Author Business Model Worksheet is a 21-tab spreadsheet we've offered for years. Using the built-in formulas for each of the 17 author income types, you can design your business around your financial goals, professional goals, lifestyle, and interests.
Beyond the Margins: Author Entrepreneurship Beyond the Page
by Sharon Woodhouse, Conspire Creative
Beyond the Margins is a twice-monthly newsletter helping authors create enterprises they love around their books, expertise, and experience. It combines 25+ years of indie publishing and author coaching into practical business insights, strategic guidance, and a community of author entrepreneurs.
Read more from Beyond the Margins: Author Entrepreneurship Beyond the Page
Authors, There’s only one thing that matters more than money for your business — yes, that’s right, there’s something more important for a business than profit: people. Profit is necessary. But what makes profit possible in the first place? People caring. People choosing to buy, read, recommend, collaborate, participate, hire, listen, and engage. At bottom, a business is built on relationships with humans and the value we create for them. We’re meaning-makers; do what you can to serve others...
Beyond the Margins: Build a Profitable Author Business Dear Authors, We run businesses. But when we spend day after day working in them, we can lose sight of the obvious opportunities for improvement — like staring at the same draft for the umpteenth time and no longer seeing what needs fixing. We’re halfway through the year, which makes this a good time to step back and look at your business with fresh eyes and ask, “how does my business actually make a profit?” Below are a few picks from...
Beyond the Margins: Build a Profitable Author Business Authors, We want to share a bit about what's been capturing our attention recently at Conspire Creative: writing and being an author in the era of AI and algorithms. It’s easy to feel as though AI will leave no place for us in the market. But I don’t see it that way. In a world with AI writing and AI “creativity,” human creativity only stands out more. Only humans can express their unique personalities, curate experiences others seek, and...
