JOURNALIST-AUTHOR-PUBLISHER-BOOKSELLER

This blog was originally published on 3rd August 2012

I had never realised my writing career would require so much multi-tasking and so many changes of direction. But perhaps that’s just life: it has a habit of throwing curve ball when you least expect it. There’s a Spanish saying, ‘La vida es corta, pero ancha’: life is short, but wide. Or it could be translated as ‘free’.

You feel you have an innate talent. You learn the skills to apply that talent; work with as much determination, energy and focus as you can muster. Then it is down to the choices that you make – for there are always openings and opportunities to be seized, or not.

I have always believed that there’s an element of luck in every successful person’s life. I also believe that there is a lot more ‘luck’ out there than we realise – and that it is not just about spotting an opportunity, but knowing how to act upon it. Are you making the best decision? The way may be clear at the start, but there are brambles ahead: it may be better to turn down the contract they are waving at you.

The trick is to know when to act and which path to take.

Ah, would that life were so clear! As a birthday looms and another year of my ‘short’ life bites the dust, I am changing course again. It’s not a complete change – more a development of what has already preceded. But have I made the right choice? There’s the rub.

People with concurrent multiple careers – who, presumably, want their lives to be ‘wide’ – often adopt a ‘hyphenated’ professional identity. So we have the ‘teacher-painter’ or the ‘doctor-potter’.

I am, now, a journalist-author-publisher-bookseller. It’s all getting a bit complicated. As I wrote in my May blog, Bits, Bits, It’s All In Bits, I have agreed the reversion of rights in my first five Sprite Sister novels. In doing so, I have bought up the remainder stock from Piccadilly Press. There are now 2000 Sprite Sister paperbacks in my garage – all waiting to be sold. There are e-books to be published.

It was Charles Handy, Britain’s foremost management writer, who mooted the concept of the portfolio career in his book, The Age of Unreason, in 1989. Handy described ‘portfolio working’ as a lifestyle in which the individual holds a number of jobs, clients and types of work, all at the same time. He argued that, even if the portfolio worker made less money, his or her life would be freer and more interesting – and thus richer.

So how does this prepare me for my new role as a bookseller? Despite academic qualifications several aeons ago, everything I have learned, professionally, has been on the hoof.

I have chosen to take the leap. Now I have to quickly apply the skills I already have and learn the ones I need, to translate my decision into future success.

Experience has taught me that things and people turn up in my life as I need them. Not as I want them.

So, readers and book buyers, commissioning editors, foreign rights managers and film producers - come forth! I await you!

PS And please hurry up, as my life is whizzing by and I will soon be too old for all this dashing about.

Half a ton of books arrive

In the garage with my 2000 books

Hope the mice don't eat them

The new edition of The Circle of Power

Sheridan Winn is a freelance journalist specialising profiles of national and international business leaders; the author of the six Sprite Sisters book, and publisher of two of them. She has just launched the first book in the series, The Circle of Power, as a print-on-demand paperback and as an e-book. 

Find out more about her at http://www.sheridanwinn.com