How To Write Your Book by Richard Webster/ 3until I was in my early forties that I was able to make a decent income as a writer.There were many reasons – excuses, mainly – for this.I started off in the right direction. When I left school, where I was an averagestudent, I worked in publishing for several years. This was a deliberate choice, as Ifelt that learning about what happened inside a publishing company would be helpfulto me as a writer. I learned a great deal.I discovered how difficult it was to get published in the first place. I learnedabout the miniscule royalties most authors made from their work. It almost put me off writing forever.I didn’t make a conscious decision to stop writing, but it did make me think.I started looking at other ways of making a living, and over the following 20years explored a wide variety of business ventures and occupations.The first of these was owning and operating a bookstore. I visualized manypleasant conversations with my customers about the latest books. Sadly, there werefew conversations of that sort, as most customers had little time to stop and talk aboutbooks and writing. The bookstore was profitable, but after a year I had had enough.After I sold it, my wife and I bought a motel, which we also had for about ayear. During that same year, I started a small importing business, and followed thiswith a printing business, a rubber stamp manufacturing company, a book distributionbusiness, and a variety of other income-earning ventures.Some of these were modestly successful, while others were not. On twooccasions, I had to interrupt my self-employment dreams for a while, because I wasnot making enough money to support my family.At one time, I sold printing services during the daytime, delivered buns anddonuts during the night, and mowed lawns in the weekend.Finally, I discovered something important and it worked well for a long time.Instead of trying to make my living doing
one
thing, I began doing
severalthings
at once.Consequently, for many years I worked as a magician, stage hypnotist, pianistand palmist. I also had a private school that conducted memory training and psychicdevelopment classes.During those years, my biggest problem was producing the correct businesscard when people requested one.I also started ghost-writing, and this revived my old dreams of becoming aprofessional writer. Ghost-writing, the way I did it, was extremely lucrative. But,after 20 ghost-written autobiographies, my enthusiasm for this kind of writing beganto wane. There was also little satisfaction in it, as I could not tell anyone whatprojects I was working on, and my name never appeared on the covers of the books.By 1987 all of my ventures were doing well, until the stock market crashbrought me back to reality. I was struggling to keep up with the work one minute,and unemployed the next. I spent the next two years demonstrating products at showsand fairs up and down the country, until my magic and hypnotism shows becameprofitable again.One morning in 1991, I woke up with a horrible thought. What would it belike to wake up at the age of 70, and it hadn’t happened? I knew instantly that “it”was my writing career. I gave myself five years to make more money out of writingthan I was making out of all the other things I was doing. Interestingly, it took almostexactly five years. Lesson: I should have given myself three years.Question: Why was I able to succeed as a writer now, when I hadn’t managedto do so before? Answer: I’d dabbled at it. I was a successful ghost-writer who had
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