If you’re a book author, blogger, marketer, consultant, social media influencer, or entrepreneur with products and services for sale—success is all about the long game. Toss passion and talent into the mix, and you have all the ingredients for a career that engages you, makes work meaningful, and offers deep satisfaction.
Sitting in the living room of friends Jim and Dee one afternoon, pretending to be brave, resolute, and pragmatic about my family’s future, I said, “Look, you know the situation with us. I’ve got to face the fact that I’m going to have to support our family from now on. . . . I just don’t know how or what.”
“Well, what do you like to do?” Jim asked the obvious question, but one I hadn’t considered while focused on financial survival.
So I sat there and pondered a moment. Should I say what I was really thinking or be practical, logical? Jim and Dee waited patiently for my answer.
“Well, I used to like to write English compositions back in school,” I finally answered. “But how can you make a living doing that?”
“I didn’t ask you how you could make a living . . . I asked what you like to do.”
“Yeah, but . . . but I’ve gotta make real money. How do you get paid to write?”
“I don’t know, but I suggest you find out!” His impish grin told me that he was quite serious.
So the next day I drove to our small downtown public library and checked out every book I could find in their 800 section on writing: writing spy novels, writing romance novels, writing greeting card verses, writing magazine articles, freelance writing, writing nonfiction book proposals. You name it: If it had “writing” in the title, I piled it on the check-out desk.
Once home, I read almost around the clock for the next three weeks (well, “as around the clock” as possible with two preschoolers underfoot). After all, I was starting this new direction from scratch. I didn’t know an author. I’d never met a marketer or agent. And I had no idea what was involved in making a living as an author.
In the back of my mind, the image of that lifestyle looked like this (similar to the lifestyle of remote workers during Covid): I’d set up a computer and card table in the corner of my bedroom, type the manuscript straight to “The End,” send it off (somewhere?), and wait for the movie version to be released.
But after reading all those library books, reality set in. I’d need an additional dose of motivation, along with a plan. The motivation came as a by-product of lunch with an engineer and his wife at their home. “So what are you thinking you’ll write about?” my Exxon engineer friend asked as we pushed chairs back away from the lunch table.
“Well, as an English major, my first thought is to write a book on writing. That’s what I know.”
He nodded and smiled. “Well, that should have a big audience. We engineers don’t know how to write! You should see the garbage that crosses my desk.” He let out a big self-deprecating laugh. “In fact, my company pays big bucks every few months to fly a consultant in from Atlanta to teach us engineers how to write engineering reports.” He pushed away from the table and stood up. “Just a minute. I think I still have the book she gave us in her workshop.”
He disappeared into a back room and came back with the book in hand. When I saw the title, my first thought was “Oh, no, somebody beat me to the topic already.” (Only later did I learn there were dozens, if not hundreds, of books on business and technical writing. Eventually, the more I read about the content industry, the less naïve I became.)
When I finished devouring the library haul from a few weeks earlier, I queried a magazine for a short article and got a go-ahead and a modest fee. After landing a couple more short how-to articles on parenting and such, a book editor called to ask if I would be interested in turning one of those articles into a book.
Such was the non-glamorous beginning that launched my content-creation career. From that book with a small publisher, my next hit was my own series with a much larger publisher: Simon and Schuster/Messner.
You might be surprised how many now-successful authors, marketers, innovator-entrepreneurs start out at the same place—clueless but hopeful. And that can be your experience as well.
More often than not, success in most fields is about the long game. In fact, I tell my book coaching clients this right upfront in our first session: “If your goal is a one-and-done book effort, then stop now—before you ever start. You’ll lessen your chances for huge disappointment.”
But if you’re willing to consider the long game in your area of expertise, then you’re well on your way to making things happen. Let me define “long game” here when it comes to creating content: I’m still earning royalties on content created four decades ago. You read that right: four decades ago.
Whether shooting videos to earn a living as a Tik-Tok influencer, offering how-to training on YouTube, or becoming a copywriter or coder for Apple or Walmart, think strategically. What’s your long-term game plan? When passion meets career planning, therein lies real success.
I still have a passion for teaching businesspeople how to improve their writing and communication skills. My most recent book, Faster, Fewer, Better Emails, focuses on helping professionals manage their inbox.
