These are actually the “Top Ten Geek Business Myths” about going into business as a tech geek, but I strongly suspect that they apply (with a little tweaking) to getting published, as well.

Myth #1: A brilliant idea will make you rich.
Myth #2: If you build it they will come.
Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don’t protect it.
Myth #4: What you think matters.
Myth #5: Financial models are bogus.
Myth #6: What you know matters more than who you know.
Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something.
Myth #8: I need $5 million to start my business.
Myth #9: The idea is the most important part of my business plan.
Myth #10: Having no competition is a good thing.
Special bonus myth (free with your paid subscription): After the IPO I’ll be happy.

So take, for example, #10:

Myth #10: Having no competition is a good thing.

Reality: If you have no competition the most likely reason for that is that there’s no money to be made. There are six billion people on this planet, and it’s very unlikely that every last of them will have left a lucrative market niche completely unexploited.

The good news is that it is very likely that your competition sucks. The vast majority of businesses are not run very well. They make shoddy products. They treat their customers and their employees like shit. It’s not hard to find market opportunities where you can go in and kick the competition’s ass. You don’t want no competition, what you want is bad competition. And there’s plenty of that out there.

The same is true for writing. If there’s nobody out there who’s getting published writing what you’re writing, it’s not likely because you’ve invented a brand-new creative niche, a new genre, a radically new way of telling a story that the world is dying to hear. It’s probably because nobody wants to buy and read stuff like that. That’s not to say that writing for the sake of your own Muse isn’t a fine thing to do, but that’s not necessarily the same as writing to get published (especially, I’d imagine,
in a first book). You want to find something where you can be authentically creative and be competitive against the other creative voices out there clamoring for attention, especially the ones already getting published. “You don’t want no competition, what you want is bad competition. And there’s plenty of that out there.”

The rest can be similarly tweaked, because they’re rules of business, and publishing (along with manufacturing) is a business — driven by both creativity and marketing. Folks on both the business end and the creativity end who forget that do not, I suspect, last long.