I’ve “read” (skimmed) two books in the last few days: Be The Media and The Four-Hour Workweek. They’ve gotten me thinking about quite a few things.

Despite the totally different audiences and topics, the books are fundamentally about the same thing: You, you brilliant snowflake you, can break out of the molds The Man’s put you in and do your own thing. Money, by the way, is not an issue.

The books take totally opposite tacks, though. The Four-Hour Workweek seems to extol the ideas of selling a product—and doing whatever you can to let that product sell itself while you take a bite of the profits. Whether that means hiring a bookkeeper or outsourcing your entire operation, you want to own a thing and make money from that thing.

Be The Media talks about self-publishing for authors, self-distribution for musicians, and so forth, but those products—those things—are a means to an end. The end is some service you provide: in the case of writing, your “service” is usually a seminar or workshop or consulting.

Both these models are tempting..who doesn’t want to have piles of cash to roll around in? But neither leaves much room for writers. Someone who wants to create something for its own sake, not as a promotional vehicle for a seminar. The Four-Hour Workweek’s model is more promising, but a writer can’t hire someone else to write for her. (Unless, again, the written product is a means to an end, not an end in itself.)

I apologize in advance for the wretched portmanteau, but what would a true writerpreneur look like?