[Writing-Publishing] Getting Re-Started From Scratch
A short personal story of how I arrived here, and what got me started, what keeps me going, what's making my future bright....
Writers write. It's in their blood, their genetic makeup, they can't help themselves. Just the way they are. And no one really knows more than that.
Unfortunately, most don't know how to write blockbusters, how to publish and market, how to run a business.
Fortunately, that's relatively easy to learn. Some take a couple of decades to figure this out and write up what they learned as best they can.
Now, such a journey isn't without missteps. And there are some people who themselves are just collecting conventional wisdom and parroting it around like Gospel Truth.
This WriterpreneurOS book started out as a way to update all I'd learned, to distill the evergreen principles out of all the earlier 22 books I'd written in just over a decade.
Meanwhile, I was also in a deep study of social media, as a purported path to build audience. However, I found instead that this was just another overlong path to nowhere. The best of the people I was listening to were taking nearly two years before they made their first dollar.
As a published author, I already knew how to earn income – write and publish books that people want.
After six months, I could see that I could either keep pumping out content to gain a tiny few followers, or I could get back to writing books.
And so, here we are, back to writing and publishing. All those essays on social media have been moved to their own separate future book as part of the editing process.
In between, I found a nice little newsletter platform called Substack. And while those six months on social media gave me no subscribers or income, within the first two weeks on this paid newsletter platform I got a half-dozen subscribers, two of them paid,
So I shut down my social media tests and went full in on my newsletter. That wasn't so hard, as I already had a smallish list. Which is now steadily growing as I continue to port my content out through my newsletter on this new platform.
I'd stumbled into a publishing business which was set up to provide non-fiction (and fiction) writers with a way to earn income from their writing. Perfect.
Why this works is more valuable than the income it earns. Because this book isn't giving you shortcuts to getting fish handed to you, it's here to teach you how to fish on your own and feed yourself forever. Plus – turn over a business to any well-deserving relative after you pass on.
This isn't what I've been taught by the “best experts” in content marketing. That's a very rough scene these days because their experts are as blind as their followers. Blinded by the very best conventional wisdom they have stumbled into.
I learned this when I volunteered to edit a book comprised of submitted chapters from their best and brightest. Only to find out that the vast majority of them didn't know how to write well – and they also didn't know how their specialty added up to a concise and cohesive pattern to earn income.
However, right at the end of that, and in the midst of my social media testing above, I did stumble onto a natural system of entrepreneurship and business that has been running since the bazaars on the Silk Road. (It's included later in this Writerpreneur OS book, and will later spin off to become a book on its own.).
The way I got out of these two messes was by continuing to research into classics. The old phrase about learning your history so you don't have to repeat the same mistakes over and over.
Writers create their work, then sell it to publishers. That's the simple income flow. Traditional artists got paid as little as the publishing houses could get away with. And accepted less than 1% of the submitted manuscripts.
But I found a guy who broke that mold in the 40's and 50's. Very simple stuff. You wrote what people wanted, and what editors accepted. W. S. Campbell was his name, and you'll see me reviving his material through my next few books. Because all of his are now out of print, and his incredibly successful course shut down some years ago, after he died in the late 50's.
In our modern day, we now have self-publishing. But the basics are the same. You have to have buyers. You want to keep their addresses so you can tell them about your new releases – and so they can tell their friends and associates about your books.
Everything else – the marketing and advertising and promotion and book formatting – all fall on your own shoulders.
But that's actually a good thing. Now your income is unlimited. Provided to study and learn and apply. That statement about self-publishing tells you what two assets you have::
1 – your content (and copyrights)
2 – a list of interested people who can be persuaded to buy your books and promote them to their friends.
You'll need a backend to sell these, and a front end which enables you to fill it up with content that is interesting and enticing. One that will acquire more subscribers.
Just a few years ago, you needed three separate services:
A – website on a hosting with a domain.
B – a backend that would accept payments and deliver your digital goods.
C – a print on demand service to keep your printed books available forever.
But the things always change if you look for the opportunities.
Substack, and a few similar platforms will help you with both content and subscribers by hosting your newsletters. They are able to enable your posts to be SEO'd and searchable. They send out your emails for you. Plus, they are built on the idea of recommending your and other's newsletters to each other, signing up and even paying for the opportunity to have access to others newsletters. No more hosting or websites per se. No separate email service provider. One channel to focus on. And you're freed up to simply concentrate on writing and promotion.
Meanwhile, aggregators take care of sending your ebooks to book distributors globally. Draft2Digital also takes care of the Print on Demand services you need, which keeps your print books in perpetual supply.
Now all you have to do is to really master your craft, which also includes mastering copywriting.
You're on your way.