One nice perk of always being on the lookout for writing work is that I find prospective clients looking to have e-books written on topics I’d love to tackle, but they want to pay peanuts to have someone write it for them and then disappear: no shared royalties, no AS TOLD TO, no acknowledgement inside of the actual writer’s contribution. In short, they want a ghostwriter to do all of the work and then hand it over for a low fixed fee so they can make whatever fortune awaits the debut of the book.
That feels fraudulent to me, but it’s entirely legal. It’s called a “work for hire.”
Instead of taking the bait and becoming a hired hand for next to nothing, I just list the topics in a small notebook and mull them over, wondering if I truly do want to write a book on the topics. If I do, I put them on my to-do list.
I have three books on my to-do list right now as a result of this gleaning process. They’re universal topics so the audience for them is vast. I’ve accumulated the ideas over the past year. I’ve thought about titles and subtitles. At some point, one of them is going to start consuming me–taking me by the throat and demanding that I get on it. At that point, I will (in my rare, spare time) instead of posting to this blog every day. I think I can reliably back off on this blog some now that’s it’s established. A blog piece every three or four days should suffice, so I can turn my attention to another form of passive income: writing another self-help book. (The one I wrote got rave reviews and landed at #1 for three days running when it debuted at Amazon, so I’m encouraged by that. Title: SETTLE FOR BEST: Satisfy the Winner You Were Born to Be. You can get it in softbound or on Kindle by clicking on the BOOKS tab above.)
The topic I spotted today may be the one to capture my undivided attention next. It won’t take long to write it, for sure. I lived through the process involved in vanquishing this particular “deal-breaker” mindset to arrive at a significant degree of success, so I certainly know what I’ll be writing about. (That always helps!)
Yes. I think I’ll give it some more thought and see if I can come up with an outline for it–one that relies on faith in a benevolent Creator (Source, God, whatever you conceive this source to be) and one that relies on zero faith, because I’ll have to address both mindsets if this is going to be a successful venture. It may become two different books. It may not. I may just tackle the faith/lack of faith issue in a single chapter because the rest of the chapters can proceed from either viewpoint, I think.
In Other News…
Do you remember the old Burma Shave signs? (I’m carbon-dating myself mentioning Burma Shave signs, aren’t I?) If you don’t remember, Google them or look them up on wikipedia.
I mention them because I’ve taken on an ad writing campaign for a gentleman which has put me in mind of those bygone roadside treasures, but these will be craigslist ads. He wants 900 of them eventually. I’ve written 36 so far and, strangely enough, the more I do, the more fun I’m having.
I was scared, at first, to take on a project like this! When you have to say essentially the same thing in just four or five lines 900 different ways, it takes a special kind of creativity to keep from going “nutso”, so I’ve summoned my internal Special Forces and asked them all to put on their thinking caps and HAVE FUN!
And boy howdy, are they having fun! I find myself grinning and laughing! I’m entertaining the hell out of myself! Best of all, I know these ads will convert. Readers won’t be able to keep themselves from clicking on the link at the end any more than travelers of old could keep themselves from reading the individual signs until they reached the one that read BURMA SHAVE.
I may indeed go mad before I get to #900, but with any luck at all the conversion rate on these first 60 or so will be so great that I can stop at #100. (If that’s the case, I’m going to ask for a piece of the pie he’s getting instead of a set fee per series!)
“My momma didn’t raise no dummies!”
