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About two dozen folks showed up at the Howe Library in Hanover, New Hampshire on Thursday night to participate in my workshop on publishing options for entrepreneurial authors. I call my two-hour standup riff on the industry What Would William Shakespeare Do? in honor of one of the most entrepreneurial of all authors, the Bard himself.

Yep, the author of Macbeth and Hamlet was quite a smart businessman as well as the touchstone of all things literary in English. He owned part of the Globe Theatre so that he would have a guaranteed venue for his plays. He wrote some of his most beautiful poetry to attract the attention of a wealthy patron. He was a landowner in Avon where he eventually retired. 

Who says that writing and business do not mix?

And yet I often encounter the feeling among writers that for some reason, the business of publishing is somehow "icky." Another common opinion is that marketing oneself is uncomfortable, that marketing can and should be handled by the publisher of a book, not the author. 

But think about that some more. Shakespeare was a great marketer as well as a writer as was Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, and Truman Capote. Mystery writer Sara Paretsky joined with a number of other women mystery writers to found the organization Sisters in Crime to make sure that the reviewing media paid as much attention to the efforts of women mystery writers as they did to men (a struggle that continues to this day).

Yes, there are instances of shy authors who become successful in spite of themselves. But they are the exceptions, not the rule. This is not a matter of cold calling (a prospect that always makes me shudder) but of providing information to prospective readers. And with the internet and blogging, much of that effort can be done through the written word.

After all, as Woody Allen once observed, ninety percent of success is just showing up.