Learning the Writerpreneur Core Basics: An Outline
We start this cohort live on Substack - here - tomorrow. Free. Just to bring everyone up to speed...
At the outset, I hope your New Year has started off well. What starts well tends to go well.
We're starting the Writerpreneur OS course tomorrow. It will be one lesson per day, containing a 3-minute (+/-) video. Each will be published for free on Substack (https://robertworstell.substack.com/s/writerpreneur-os) and then these retired behind a paywall sometime after that.
I am "comping" those who bought the beta course on Gumroad for a 3-month paid subscription.
In doing that, I can enable the daily discussion threads via Substack for paid subscribers.
Otherwise, I'm looking for feedback via the comments on every lesson. Feel free to add your 2 cents. (Likes and re-stacks are very welcome…)
The paid subscribers will also get my supplemental posts with daily assignments for the cohort. Those posts will also be uploaded to the Gumroad course for later self-paced students.
Outline of This Course
The course is organized into sections:
1) Expectations - Where we take up in the first eight lessons all about setting your goals and how to make these effective. (Which are all applicable for those of us with New Year's Resolutions.) Most people on this planet (probably 97% or better) never set goals for themselves and what they want to accomplish, attain, or acquire in their lives. And do not review these goals several times daily, nor do they orient their actions almost exclusively toward achieving those goals throughout every minute of each day.
The bulk of writers out there do not have and hold a vision - in all it's myriad of details - of what a successful, well-paid author looks like. From what books you have published, right out to what promotion you are routinely doing to attract and build those sales.
2) Reading - the old phrase that lays out an author's journey to success is "Writers Read a Lot and Write a Lot." By this, they imply that you will need to read a lot every day to keep finding your techniques in the published works of other writer.
But I've only found two authors that prescribe exactly how to go about this. And these two are excerpted in these lessons so that you learn from them about how to go about your daily reading.
3) Writing - before you even start to outline your book, you have to make 7 decisions. These were laid out by Walter S. Campbell in his "Professional Writing" course in 1944. These choices cover your subject, reader, model, effect, style, market, and the project you'll start based on these choices.
I've included short excerpts from the chapters where Campbell laid out these 7 choices. As you learn these, you'll narrow strictly into what you'll need to do to make your published book into a profitable income stream. And that work starts before you type a single word.
4) Publishing and Marketing - This is the shortest of all the sections. Just four lessons to round everything out. Certainly nothing beyond core basics here.
Also included in the raw materials is an entire book on this subject, pulled from the 15 books I've written on this subject over the last decade. I've only extracted and modernized the evergreen principles and strategies that work on both fiction and non-fiction, regardless of genre.
While Marketing could be said to be a subset of Publishing, it is started by the author before they begin to write. The homework necessary to build a book that ranks well and sells regularly has to be done early. And you are writing always with your marketing in some back corner of your mind. Certainly when you review and revise your book, the result will be something that you can talk about and promote during all the many podcasts or media interviews you may do during the course of your writing. And what you will be posting to pre-sell your book.
The Length and Breadth this Course
This beta is going to be run as a daily cohort, as well as aggregating the material so that it can be self-paced as well. One lesson per day.
The point of a month-long course is to build your writing habits so that you can continue right along after this course is done. By the end of this course, you'll have been enabled to self-publish a book of your own, and taken through the basics you need to write daily, publish weekly, and compile larger texts that become paperback editions suitable for any buyer's bookshelves.
You'll also learn the basics of how to get a newsletter going for your audience, and set up a ready income stream from these alone. These are supplemental lessons to the course proper, but will show up as we go. You'll be working daily. Every day.
Future Courses in the Pipeline?
After this course (and any revisions) are complete, I'll be revamping all of Campbell’s books into our modern parlance and finding additional examples of how his textbooks can be applied by any author. In this, there will be more courses and books that layout training, continuing probably through this next year.
Campbell left us over 750 pages of material, nearly 300,000 words in four textbooks from teaching his course for nearly 20 years. It was the single most successful writing course I've been able to find. And this is why I'm devoting this next year to making his lessons available widely - perhaps to develop a demand which inspires his former publishers to exhume his texts into our modern day of Print-On-Demand and evergreen ebooks.
Do subscribe to this newsletter so you don't miss any of these 28 lessons. You will find that these lessons are not the usual fare for beginning authors. I am not teaching how to write. I'm teaching the core basics of how a writer becomes an entrepreneur and earns steady income from his writing.
But just the core basics.
Because your book deserves to come to life and you deserve to be well-rewarded for your skill and ability to write.
The days of the starving writers in garrets are over.
Writerpreneur OS is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.