Self-Publishing

Just Write The Damn Thing!

Over the years I’ve met dozens of writers who labor for weeks, months, even years over a project and never get it done. They go back and check every word, every phrase, every punctuation mark. They write and rewrite over and over again, and they never manage to finish.

When I was a young man wanting to break into the weekly newspaper business, I had discovered a nice community on the Washington coast where I wanted to start a paper. Even though I had a journalism degree, I had never actually worked in the business. I knew the theory, if you will, but had no idea of the nuts and bolts needed to get a paper out every week.

I knew that publishing a successful community newspaper required more than just writing the stories – I needed to know how to sell advertising, how to design the ads, how to collect for them, how to set up a delivery system, how to lay out a newspaper, and much, much more that was never covered in a college classroom.

Several months before, while traveling through the region looking for a suitable town to launch my publishing venture, I had picked up a weekly paper in a small town in Idaho that really impressed me. I called the publisher, a crusty old fellow with ink in his veins instead of blood, and introduced myself. I told him I planned to start a community newspaper, that it would be located several hundred miles away from his operation and be no competition at all, and that I wanted to learn everything I could about how to put out a successful weekly newspaper. I asked if I could come over to Idaho and work for free for a month or two and have him teach me some of what I needed to know.

“You come on over,” he told me, “and if you’re willing to work hard, you’ll know the business by the time you leave.”

What followed can best be described as a small town publisher’s boot camp. In the next few weeks that man worked me like a dog six days a week, twelve and fourteen hours a day. He had me doing everything from emptying the trash to riding with the deliveryman. I did grunge work like cleaning the chemicals out of the film developers for the old Compugraphic typesetters. I cleaned the rollers and ink wells on the press. I accompanied the advertising sales reps on their calls, I was back in the composing room laying out pages (this was long before we had computers that do it all for us), I spent hours in the darkroom developing photos, I sat at the bookkeeper’s desk and helped her call delinquent accounts to badger them into paying their advertising bills.

Finally, he handed me a notebook and camera and sent me out to cover a few small stories – the induction of new officers at the garden club, the town council meeting, a planning and zoning commission hearing, and an interview with a new doctor who had opened up a practice in town. I quickly learned that in small communities, these things are the news!

I was at my desk laboring over one of these stories, and it just wasn’t coming out right. Frustrated, I ripped the third or fourth sheet of paper out of the IBM Selectric typewriter to start over when my mentor loomed over my desk.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“I’m just trying to get the right angle on this story,” I told him. “I can’t seem to get it right.”

“Right angle? Did you get the Five Ws?” (In journalism, the Five Ws are the basics of any story – Who, What, Where, When and Why.)

“Yes, I’ve got all that,” I assured him. “It’s just not flowing. It’s….”

“Stop” he ordered. “You’re making this much harder than it has to be. You’re not writing the Great American Novel. You’re writing a little story in a little newspaper in a little town. People who read it don’t want to be moved until they cry. They don’t want to see the story made into a movie of the week. They just want to know where the new doc came from, what kind of training he has, if he has a wife and kids, and when his office will be open. So stop wasting time and just write the damn thing!”

At the end of my month in Idaho I still wasn’t an experienced journalist, but I knew enough to get the first issue of my own newspaper on the street, and over a few years I built that one paper into a small chain of seven weeklies and shoppers. I called on my mentor many times over the years, and though I was brokenhearted when a heart attack took his life a few years later, I was honored that his wife asked me to take the helm at their family paper until she could arrange a sale. I tried to repay his kindness of years before by spending part of each week running my own operation, then flying to Idaho for two or three days a week to keep their paper going until we could find a buyer.

I learned a lot of lessons at that man’s side, and as a writer, the most important lesson was to write the damned thing. As nonfiction writers and publishers, that’s our job. To crank out good, useful information that our intended readers will buy, and of a quality that they will come back for more.

Sure, we all want to do our very best. We all need to know the basic rules of punctuation and grammar, how to structure a sentence, and how to get our point across without putting the reader to sleep. However, our goal here is to make money. Remember, we are not “artists.” We are publishers, and we publish for profit.

If you are publishing special reports, booklets, or books on woodcarving, or building bird feeders, or raising gerbils, you need to crank out a lot of work to make money. You cannot afford to spend weeks or months on a 30 page booklet that sells for $8. You need to finish the project and move on to another one if you want to make a living as a publisher. Success comes in numbers. The more products you have available, the more you will sell, and the more you will earn.

You are not Stephen King or John Grisham. So stop trying to convince yourself that you are. And if you do think that you are in league with those distinguished gentlemen, this probably isn’t the website for you. We’re hacks here. Our goal is to make money from putting words on paper. A lot of words. Nothing happens until we sell something, and we can’t sell it if we never finish writing it.

So stop belaboring every word in every line to death. Just write the damn thing!

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