The Great Writing and Publishing Adventure Begins Anew
Where the Hero Quits Refusing the Call to Write, to Publish, to Make Their Dreams Become Actuality...
Well, that’s a bit over dramatic. But it was another 4am wake up call that led me to write you...
What are you really doing with your writing?
Where are you going with all this typing and recording and publishing?
For most of us, this is really a given: we must write. Because something in us demands it. Some muse, somewhere, is insistent that we write. And when we write, we feel better - at least when it’s all done.
I’ve been writing for a long time. My “reports from the field" when sent on a project to consult and fix some remote organization were always long and involved and immersive. And when I returned later to get some college degrees, my papers only started warming up after 2,000 words while my other co-students were chafing at even finding 1,500. My idea of a proper paper was to turn in a 20-plus page thesis instead of two or three double-spaced pages with wide margins.
A Problem in Outlets
When I found out about self-publishing in 2006, I was relieved. Because I could get all these words assembled and put somewhere as a finished work. Not just somewhere, but actually anywhere and everywhere. There was no more situation with finding a place to send my material where people could find it and read it.
On top of that, they'd actually pay you for your work. If they liked it and if they could somehow find it in and amongst all the other books already out there. A lot of if’s.
Normal, everyday situations for every writer, I am told.
I'd already been blogging for years, Either I'd post daily, or several times a day, depending on what I was researching and experiencing at the time. It helped that I'd been working to find out how the world works since Age 8. So that was another skill in my corner - researching.
And blogging was publishing to the world. And yet, my blog never caught on. But it did give me a way to refine my writing and my stories. Plenty of practice.
In 2013, I took up the blog-to-book idea and published my daily mental perambulations to the world. 5 years of blogging wound up as over 232,000 words. And I sold one or two copies over the next few years. But now it was out there. Done.
The lack of sales started my studies into copywriting the next year. Within a couple of years, I had three books which were selling regularly, and giving me enough income to fire my last boss. My blurbs and keywords were a tad bit improved.
Then I started working up all I was finding out about self-publishing. About 15 ebooks later, I thought I generally had it all laid out. And sold a few of these books along the way.
There was still a problem in outlets. I didn't know why some books sold and some didn't. Three non-fiction paperbacks were routinely selling enough that I could invest my time just studying whatever I was interested in. Or wherever my curiousity dragged me.
The Great Fiction Writing Challenge
That's what I called my first year of trial-by-fire research into fiction writing. The premise was to test what I'd been swallowing about how much money was being made in fiction ebook writing. I started in the fall of 2017 to compile everything I could find about fiction writing. And then in January 2018 started the test of writing an original short story every week for a year. That being the way that a number of successful Golden Age authors got their start.
At 24 weeks, I found myself writing story #48. So I doubled my goal and kept on. Yes, I was still blogging most every week, chronicling my work and discoveries. At the end of that year, I published short story #100, and by then I'd also published another 30 collections of these stories - hedging my bet that the paperback versions would outsell the single ebooks.
And they did - but those paperback fiction booksales never took off enough to compete with my non-fiction paperbacks, which were my bread-and-butter.
I continued at a slowing fiction writing pace over the next few years, finally taking a hiatus in Jan 2022. And filled in the odd moments with more non-fiction. My books had become routinely longer, all my fiction was now into novelette range, and my last was a full-blown nouvella - half way to a novel. By now, I'd published a couple of novels and compiled nine more from my short story anthologies. Won NaNoWriMo three times. And my non-fiction books were now routinely around 30,000 words or more - healthy novellas.
The grand experiment was a non-monetary success, though. I was hooked on the sheer joy of fiction writing - which also then reinforced the satisfaction I'd been having from assembling a non-fiction work.
All while I was enjoying my work immensely.
Still, there was a hard nut to crack about getting a popular book out. Or so I still thought.
Somewhere along the line, I met a non-fiction editor who had been 30 years working for one of the big publishing firms. She said I had a lively writing voice. And told me that it was usual in the industry for a non-fiction writer to have only a single book out there. More interesting was her revelation that not a single one of the authors she worked with liked writing. They actually disliked the process.
There was the real crux of the problem: that editor had herded authors through books that sold well enough to cover their advances and printing costs. They were technical successes. Yet the authors hated the process.
I, on the other hand, loved writing and found the publishing process fascinating. While the majority of my books made little return, they also cost very little to produce. I was free to write whatever I wanted, whatever I was fascinated with at the time. And enjoy every step of the journey as I went.
That was the solution to the problem that I didn't think I had - but others did.
Tracking Down the Author's Audience
This last year, just 6 months ago, I started yet another test. On social media. The apparent problem was that I had no audience. All the current crop of "guru's" I was following said that you need an large audience of devoted fans that you built relationships with and so you were able to influence your own book sales.
And a large number of them were working in social media to build that audience.
So I dove into social media full bore.
I'd already considered social media a waste of time for me personally, since I wasn't really too fascinated with needing approval from a bunch of people I hardly knew, and whose opinions about how to live a quality life were a bit sketchy at best. That was my attitude of all the cat pictures I'd seen, and scanning the political opinions as well as listening to their various life-stories which were often more tragedy than comedy.
And on top of that, a marketer named Tim Grahl did social media tests with his clients years before this. He found that one set who invested heavily in promoting their book on social media had next to no return in terms of sales. While a second set of his authors, who suggested others share that authors’s books on social media, did show a normal uptake in sales - as long as those authors were regularly promoting through other outlets (and the main one being that they'd already built a large mailing list of readers.)
His third set of authors had to take a longer route - where they had to use their book to build that list of readers.
So you can see where I started out here:
Some successful authors hate the writing-publishing process -
While I enjoy writing, like publishing.
Social Media doesn't make books sales
But does apparently somehow build a subscriber list, while
I despise what passes for “social” media.
But I dove in anyway.
For a writer, either Twitter or LinkedIn are logical choices - they are text-based.
Both require posting at least once per day for something like 18 months before you can attract enough followers to convert them to a sizeable subscriber list. That's from several sources. And one of these studies says that if you're working as a content entrepreneur, your first earned dollar is at least a year off, other than what you scrabble together meanwhile by hiring your services out to keep your bills paid.
One of the first datum’s I ran across on Twitter-X (but apparently similar on other social media) is that 99% of all users never amass more than 1,000 followers. Which meant also that the bulk of users there were simply consumers.
This then backed up when I found that a couple of persons who became outliers by making over six figures and gotten tens of thousands of followers within a year had one thing in common - they were both entertainers. That expalined a few things.
But backtracking others who had amassed followings on social platforms found they had already made their own fortunes before taking up social media. At least one billionaire in that group. And this led to the explanation of the "Twitter Money" crowd. They followed and bought the courses and books of people they were identifying with. Their rock stars.
Two people I was able to chase down had gone the long route and made their millionaire incomes just since they started on social media. They sold now courses about how to make money writing on Twitter and LinkedIn. Obviously popular on those platforms. And again, an identity issue.
Flywheels and Deceptions
About that time I also heard about a phrase called the "flywheel" - which essentially boils down to having your course graduates recommend that people they know become followers for you and buy your courses.
And I then said to myself, "Wait. I've heard this before."
Years ago, I extracted myself from a couple of scams and got my money back, mostly. And did a study of how I kept getting scammed. Then wrote a book and gave it away, along with a short course, that told how to do what I did. The book wasn't really popular. I didn't care. I'd made my point.
Meanwhile, what this book covered was the old Internet Marketing scammers who were networked together, pushing each others product launches, and paying each other off with affiliate sales percentages. Those were the top leaderboard guys. And they had amassed huge mailing lists. The lower sections on the leaderboard were filled with people who made their income from affiliate marketing. Big lists. Mailed out the offers every month and hyped them up.
These were scams.
Because they promised what they couldn't deliver. And the entire industry was built around these people simple re-inventing the wheel a couple of times a year, and creating the videos and PDF's people could pay for. In their off times, they were promotion the other people in their network who had their products ready. And they scheduled their releases with each other.
More Flywheels. Just upside down in results. What goes around comes around.
I studied this out, and found a guy who had detailed all their network into what he called a "mafia" approach. They all denied it. But it was a workable truth. And once you recognized their model and how it worked, you could then quit the hamster wheel they had you on. The one that was costing you hundreds of dollars every month.
Twitter likes these guys that push Twitter products. Obviously. But the business plan for the major social media is to sell ads. So they don't want you to go anywhere else, and anytime you post a link elsewhere, they tend to throttle that post so few people see it. They want 99% of everyone's eyeballs watching ads. And is why they tolerated "bots" clicking on things. Because people pay them to run ads for them - the price based on views and clicks on their ads.
The penny dropped.
Someone said way earlier that when the platform is free - you are their product. And now this makes sense. Why studies say social media is depressing. Why there has been no cultural or scientific breakthrough from any social media.
The old joke comes back: People were trying to get down from an elephant - when the best and softest down comes from a goose.
You don't get audience from social media because you are the audience. If you want to expand your brand as a millionaire, then you can. But you don't need an audience - you just want to expand your audience to make even more money. And since you are already sitting on millions, you don't worry about investing 18 months and paying your bills meanwhile.
Learning Author's Craft and the Substack Rescue
At the outset of this Twitter/Social Media test, I found that people on Twitter liked threads with images. And that it's "necessary" to post at least 4 times per day. Threads I limited arbitrarily to 3000 characters, which was the LinkedIn default setting for posts. That's about 500 words, as it turns out.
You can tell from the above, I have no problem with being prolific. But - as pointed out by the "guru's" - most people do have a problem creating that much content. But I had a hole card: I was already started updating all the 15 ebooks I'd written since 2013 on writing and publishing online. My solution was to simply pull the truly evergreen material out of these books and then squeeze their essence into one or several 500-word threads. Problem solved.
While all this was going along, I found two more books by Walter S. Campbell and started to take him seriously. He had started a non-credit university-sponsored course in the late 1940's and ran this very successfully for 20 years. How successfully was measured through thousands of students publishing over 150 hardback books (in addition to numerous short stories, articles, and every other type of writing.) And they made over a million in royalties paid in 1950-era dollars. Internationally, in several languages. Meaning: he worked out how to routinely train writers to become professionals - to make a living from routinely working at their craft. And that is something that's long been missing since. His course no longer exists, and all his books our out of print.
I now had a mission.
These two datum’s led me to the facts that: 1) I needed to have an offer to sell in order to earn immediate income, and 2) this needed to be a course about successful and professional writing and publishing that people actually wanted.
Meanwhile, I would compile this course along with my updates to build a nice solid text that I could giveaway as a subscriber magnet as well as selling as a nice paperback that would accompany and augment that short course.
About the time I discovered that disheartening fact above that social media is a giant scam, I also ran across a study of a person who had made their own six-figure income by publishing a paid newsletter on Substack.
Once I dug into this platform, the scales fell from my eyes and and I went all in. Here was a platform devoted to helping writers make a living. Importing everything I had here then laid the foundation for success. After all, I was used to making money by publishing what I wrote. And saw that dumping content into Twitter, only to have it buried in minutes was distracting me from expanding my main income source of printed non-fiction books.
In six months, I'd made no extra income, gotten no additional subscribers, added just over fifty followers.
In just over two weeks on Substack, I'd added 7 more subscribers. Two of these were paid.
Ta-Daa!
Now we have a platform.
Now we have a purpose.
All I have to do at this point is to work out how to deliver the goods and promote it in a way that others will spread the news.
Upcoming and Evolving
Of course, no book and no course starts out perfect. But writing in public tends to iron out the weak spots in them. Out of necessity.
And this is the whole theory of what I am setting out to accomplish.
I've been building a course, and whittling it down to only a month-long cohort, with a self-study version that is somewhere over 60 minutes of video - plus that monster textbook inside it.
This course has a very simple object: teaching the core basics of how writer can set up their writing to earn them an extra income stream through publishing and selling their own works.
And then doing that for the rest of their lives. As long as they want to.
One thing I'd learned from Twitter is that it's financially successful to make a short course, simple, and deliver a single takeaway. Priced affordably.
You live and you learn. These are somehow connected to your own evolution.
The current plan is to open this course on January 2nd and run it for some 28 days - one video per day. And I'll be running it here and on Gumroad. For all paid subscribers here, and those who paid for the beta course on Gumroad.
Here we have audio and chats and discussion threads. Limited to paid subscribers. Makes sense. Of course, I'll paywall the posts, but leave enough "leak" through to use these lessons themselves as subscriber magnets.
After it's done - one short month, daily lessons - then I'll revise what I need to and set it up as a self-paced course with a final, higher price.
Meanwhile, I'll have more feedback as more grist for the mill.
Between now and then, I simply need to promote this via Substack (and then, to social media) so people can find the course and book for themselves.
Which is where you come in.
If you enjoyed this overlong perambulation - then please share. And, of course, subscribe.
Life comes around only once, it's rumored. So we might as well get what we can while we can - which means training up as a writer so you can communicate better and so improve your life. All while you intensely enjoy your own writer's journey.
That's what this is for, and all I'm here for, really. To help you however I can.
Join me.