A New Journey in Writing Out Loud Begins
A study in turning word-blatherers into published and profitable authors...
Hello again.
Long ago, I found I was prolific as a writer. While I was quiet as a person, I did have a lot to say privately that was vital to me. Vital is what is interesting to the point of fascination and involving emotionally.
And that is, what I'm told and tested to be true, what makes a good writer - the ability to write an engaging story. The rest is developing technique.
And it's been those realizations I've had that bought me to you and enable me to somewhat bare my soul. We'll keep somethings private, as they should be (no one wants Too Much Info these days). Otherwise, I find that people like to know that their authors are about. They like to connect.
I'm about to launch a course in public in a few days. Then, I'll be giving you 28 lessons over the same amount of days. This is where I've been distilling down the core basics of writing and publishing and entrepreneuring in bite-sized bits.
It's only taken a lifetime to get to this point. 67 years, actually. All spent in search of workable truths that explain how things work.
Recently, I've unearthed the long out of print texts of Walter S. Campbell. He developed and ran the most effective writing course probably of all time. For about 20 years, until he passed. And graduated thousands of students on a non-credit course of study. They published over 150 books and too numerous articles and short stories, earning over a million in royalties and payments for their work. To international markets. All out of a small college town in Oklahoma - unless they were subscribing by mail.
How he succeeded where others failed was in how he studied the width and breadth of published works - modern, back through Shakespeare's times, right back to the early Greeks. He sought anything and everything that helped writers tell their stories and make themselves a commercial success.
Since his course was quit, and his books ceased being published, he's been almost forgotten. Yet he had his fingers on the pulse of a very life subject that still rackets through our current times.
It's the writer and the communicator who evolves our culture. While the poorly trained or mis-trained word-blatherer devolves it. When you read a 200-year-old classic and are still moved by their prose, you know there is something these worth studying.
And when you struggle to read overlong essays online, where only every now and then there is a bright spark of engaging wordplay - then you are looking at a writer who has the basic talent, but is untrained in how to effectively get it over the plate consistently.
I volunteered as an editor for a compiled work some months ago. We had people who were expert in their fields and were making a living at it. They in turn had all volunteered to contribute to a book that would forward the current state of content entrepreneuring.
My job was to cobble these writings into shape, to make them into a cohesive whole that told the story of building a content entrerpeneurship that works. To engage, to inspire, to educate.
The problem was that only a couple of these contributing authors actually knew how to write. Sure, they could put words on a page, but the story rambled or was cut short, and didn't tell the story you knew was there.
Myself and a couple of other editors had a massive challenge. The deadline was moved to enable what we had to do - which was to edit and rearrange and sometimes rewrite what they had submitted into some form that really told the story they intended.
In a few extreme cases, what they originally submitted was book-ended with openings and endings of our own words so that what they said became a diamond in a new setting.
Owing to time and space constraints, it was an heroic effort for us all.
Meanwhile, I was scanning these Campbell books in and correcting the optical character recognition (OCR) to make it all readable again - and study-able.
Between these two projects, I realized both the need for effective writer training and also an effective program to follow. We all needed a writer training program that would result in writers who knew their stuff and could routinely.
And my next mission, my next journey then began. By 1957, Campbell left us over 750 pages - over 295 thousand words - with instructions of how to become writers who could support ourselves entirely by writing.
Of course, this is a bit dated now - in style and substance. No one else has seemingly taken up the mantle he wore.
We have all had to teach ourselves what we could find about what we like to do most. Our educational systems have never taken this subject up effectively. Or we'd have far more competition than we do. Effective writers would be like Ford automobiles arriving off an assembly line.
Worse, what our schools have taught us has to be carefully ignored. Stilted and stodgy, dull and boring - that's their product. How to write effective and engaging compositions has been turned into how to get a grade in a classroom so you can move on and graduate somehow.
All this came up during that compressed-time book-editing project.
And I resolved to start taking over my own book sales during that time and start getting my own income under control. If I wasn't being paid what I was worth, then I saw that I also had to learn for myself what effective writing is - and emulate the best. That was the solution to any financial woes I was encountering. I also had to learn how to make my publishing more renumerative.
I've been publishing since 2007, and making a decent living from my writing since about 2012. I fired my last boss then, as a job was too much of a distraction to my writing and publishing. During this career, I've published over 50 original non-fiction books and 245 fiction books. I've cobbled several courses together, done more than a few videos. Sixteen years of mostly profitable writing and publishing.
You can look me up if you want and verify most of this.
The point to life is to live it fully. Anyone should have all the income they need to cover their own bills and do whatever they want in life.
For most of us, that has meant having jobs and working for someone else.
A tiny few of us have gotten the writing bug and decided to make our own way based on our writing skills. Of course, this also means we need to understand entrepreneurial skills.
I thought this project of editing above was going to help us get a handbook that would achieve that. One that would help people make a living at effectively creating salable content. And we're about to find out early this coming year whether all that work did wind up with a text that does.
Meanwhile, my continuing studies show that there are gaps in that training. And Campbell is the overall model I've uncovered to bridge those gaps. Along with what I'm discovering about real entrepreneuring here on Substack.
In the coming month, you'll see my new course coming out as a first step to bridging those obvious gaps. It will also have a much longer accompanying text.
And all of this is being built in public, right out in the open, for free. Well, at first. Once it's out there, then it will go behind a paywall. And I'll start the next course that follows on its heels. And the whole journey has at least five courses with books to just start building the bridge that will take any writer from where they are toward the ideal of becoming a published author who is making a decent living at their chosen craft.
Again, this will be published as free to all - intially. Then pay-walled while I start on the next one.
Obviously, you'll want to stay tuned. Subscribe and all that.
Because this is looking to be a very exciting journey and you're invited.