Colleen Newvine Tebeau has a unique skill set that’s one part business guru, and one part creative entrepreneur. She has has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Central Michigan and an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan. She worked as a reporter and editor at daily, weekly and monthly publications before flipping over to the business side. Today she’s director of market research at the Associated Press in New York. She also has her own blog, Newvine Growing, which is about living life intentionally, and continues to freelance to scratch her writing itch.

All that is to say Colleen gets writing both from a purely imaginative standpoint and from a more practical standpoint.

I asked her to stop by Help for Writers to chat about why mixing the corporate and the creative can be a breakthrough for writers.

Q: What are the three mistakes you see creative types making most frequently when it comes to their work?

That depends on why you write. If it’s just a pleasurable pursuit for you, like playing on a recreational softball team or baking, then you can do it however, whenever it makes you feel good.

I worked my way through college writing for the college newspaper so I always saw writing as a way to earn money. Maybe that’s why I’m always so amazed when I see people recoiling with horror at the thought that they should treat their writing as a business.

Making money from your writing doesn’t sully you as a creative person. It helps you buy groceries, and perhaps lets you spend more timing writing and less time on other things that aren’t writing but that you do to buy groceries.

So number 1 is just recoiling from the thought that writing and business can go together. They can.

Number 2 is not truthfully estimating how much time and expense is going to go into a project and pricing their work accordingly. If you’re willing to invest 20 hours and 50 bucks worth of long-distance calls for a $65 freelance piece, that’s your decision. Maybe you really enjoy the topic and the pleasure you get from it makes it worth it. But it might also be that you haven’t stopped to calculate what you’ll have to invest to do the work and don’t value your own time enough to decide whether it’s worth it.

Number 3 is thinking that as long as you’re talented, you’ll make money. There are loads of talented people in the world not making a dime from their efforts, and plenty of examples of, um, less talented people rolling in dough. Yes you should work on your writing, but if you want to treat it as a business, you can’t neglect the other pieces, like good, consistent marketing or managing your finances well.

Q: What are the benefits to running your creative endeavors like a business?

I’m going to assume that you write because you like writing — fair guess?

If you like writing, chances are you’d like to do it more than lots of other ways you could support yourself.

If you’re willing to treat your creativity as a business, you probably have a better chance of turning it into something that helps support you. If not full time, what if you could write and have a part-time job to supplement your writing?

I think treating your creativity like a business helps justify the time and energy you put into it. It gives it legitimacy as a serious pursuit, not just a hobby you fit into your spare time.

Plus getting a pay check for your writing gives you that feedback we all crave, that someone out there thinks you’re a good writer. It’s excellent validation.

Q. What does it mean to treat your creativity as a business?

Let me use a restaurant as an analogy.

Let’s say you’re a great cook so you open a restaurant. You make great food but you don’t advertise the business because you aren’t interested in marketing, you don’t keep track of your expenses because you aren’t interested in accounting, you don’t hire good employees or train them well because you aren’t interested in organizational behavior.

Do you think your restaurant will success just on the strength of your great food?

Being in any kind of business means you need to work on all aspects of the business, not just the ones you like, if you’re going to succeed.

Novelists, for example, need to do a lot of their own marketing to help sell their books, so it’s as important to have a good website and to organize book events as to write a great book.

The good news is that you don’t have to be great at everything yourself. That cook who opens the restaurant probably hires a bookkeeper, for example. If you can’t afford to pay for help, you can probably find friends who would love help writing a brochure or copy for their website in exchange for their help on your marketing or accounting.

Q: What do you recommend for a writer looking to get organized?

I think the very first step is to figure out what your goal is — is it to write and sell a novel or to become a full-time freelance journalist? Is it to write a few short stories for fun or to become a best-selling author?

Once you figure that out, look for examples of people doing what you want to do and see what you can identify about what they’re doing that you aren’t. Do they have an active e-mail list for their fans? Are they touring the country to support their books? Do they have an agent and a publisher?

If you’re having trouble with this, try reading trade publications like Writers Digest or maybe even talk to some people doing what you’d like to do.

Then make a list of the skills you either need to develop yourself or need to barter for or pay for. Set goals for yourself to take classes, meet people, do whatever you need to do to round out those business skills.

And since my mom was my tax preparer for years, I’ll suggest one good step in getting organized is keeping good records of your expenses. If you’re going to treat your writing as a business, you need to save every receipt and probably get yourself a good accountant who understands self employment to help you get the most benefit from the money you’re spending.

Q: What is one thing every creative type can do today, right now, to increase productivity?

My husband is a painter and he’s borrowed a quote he likes to use often: paintings are never finished, only abandoned.

Working as a daily newspaper writer was great training for calling something finished whether you loved it or not. There was a deadline that wasn’t going to move so you got your story as good as you could before the paper had to go to press.

If you treat your creativity as a business, you start to think of every hour you invest as real money — your time is worth something. So you could probably work on that same story for another month, but would it make you more money to do that? And realistically, you’d still not be 100 percent satisfied with it. None of us ever are.

So I think the one thing you can do is give yourself an amount of time you’re willing to work on something and when you’re done, stop. Instead of working on it twice as long as you need to, put that additional time into something else.

Q: Do you have any good resources for creatives looking to become more business savvy. in addition to your blog and consulting services?

I’d suggest looking for inspiration in business stories in a variety of outlets, not just publications for writers. You might borrow excellent ideas from stories about entrepreneurs, for example, or learn something about marketing from a story about an ad campaign.

Just a sampling of some places you might poke around:

– Harvard Business Review — a great resource on a whole variety of business topics. For example
http://hbr.org/2010/06/managing-yourself-turn-the-job-you-have-into-the-job-you-want/ar/1
http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2010/07/how-to-avoid-and-quickly-recov.html

– Paid Content — if you want to know what’s going on in modern publishing, this is a must read
http://paidcontent.org/

– Advertising Age — looking for inspiration on your book’s marketing? Turn off Mad Men and look at what the 21st century ad industry is doing
http://adage.com/

– The Poynter Institute’s leadership and business section — focused reading on the business side of the media
http://www.poynter.org/subject.asp?id=14