Fiction is my passion. Stories that matter and that have something to say were my earliest independent love, they have been the focus of my creativity for a quarter century now, and I have made them my career.
Now, a few months from fifty, I want to tell you about the vision I have for the future of writing and great storytelling, and ask you where and how you might choose to join it.
My vision compresses down to three words:
Create, Teach, Produce.
One: Create
I want to bring meaningful stories to discriminating readers, viewers, and listeners.
This means I’ll continue to write my own fiction. Working on novels 34 and 35—with 32 published novels behind me—I’m pretty well established in that part of my vision.
Two: Teach
Beyond writing my own work, I want to help more good stories make it into the world. To me, this means offering powerful tools to writers to help them write stories that are the best work they have in them—not just filler for bookshelves, but stories that come from their heart and passion, and that, when written, move, inspire, and enrich the lives of the readers who discover them.
To this end, I’ve created all the free writing resources on the Forward Motion pages of my site, all the short writing courses in my online shop, and my first two comprehensive writers’ training courses, my how to write your novel and build your career course, How To Think Sideways, and my novel revision course, How To Revise Your Novel.
Those are a start. I have a stack of notebooks full of other ideas, and am simply working to make the time to create what’s in those notebooks. (Create A World Clinic is next.)
Three: Produce
Even beyond that, though, I want to create a publishing enterprise where editors come up with their genres and themes and are directly rewarded for their success, where writers create stories that matter to them and are directly rewarded for connecting with the readers who long for the stories they’re telling, and where people whose creative passion is storytelling can make a good living doing what they love.
Rebel Tales is the start of this part of what I want to create. Rebel Tales is still in a holding pattern while Margaret finishes and tests the backend that will allow me to pay each writer and each editor monthly their percentage of their work’s monthly gross income.
Because I think direct, perpetual monthly royalties on works created are the best way to encourage great work, and because building a way for people to be able to make their passion into their career matters deeply to me, it’s critical that I be able to pay my writers and editors in this fashion from the start.
Four: Help Out
While not immediately connected to the production of great storytelling and the creation of an expanding body of fiction worth reading, making sure that my readers, writers, and editors don’t starve is a big deal for me.
I’ve done some work to this end. I created affiliate programs to pay 50% of individual sales to anyone whose recommendation of my courses (or my writers’ courses) leads to the sale.
I created the 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make publishing program for people who had deep knowledge in a subject to create writers’ guides on subjects writers frequently get wrong and sell them through my shop.
I want to create a site that will allow these folks and other specialists to teach regular courses and offer information in their areas of expertise to writers who need a one-stop shop for research.
Sitting in a holding pattern, I have Money To Write (how to create monthly “royalty” income that will allow you to write full-time). I have an enormous amount of material for this program, but no time to get it into the software or do the necessary promotion.
I have discovered to my chagrin that I cannot do everything.
And the reality is that I’ll be fifty in October, and no matter how much time I have left, it’s running out at a hell of a pace.
I need help.
I have never longed to change the world. In fact, I’m utterly and ferociously against anyone whose stated goal is to save the world.
My objective is and always has been to work with those people who dare to dream that they could create, who dare to act to pursue their dream, and who want to make their own lives better—for them I create the tools and the training and the community that will allow them to do this.
To fulfill my own dream, to build my chosen vision into reality,
I need people for whom bringing great, unique stories to readers tired of “canned fiction product” matters. And if you aren’t a writer, a reader, or an editor of any stripe, I still need artwork, web design, data entry, product finishing, contract and rights assistance, and other things I guarantee you I haven’t even thought of yet.
If my objective strikes a chord with you, if my vision resonates with you, and if you can see yourself as a part of this, then look at what I want to do, and tell me where you fit in—what you can do, why you want to do it, where your passion lies. What is YOUR dream, and how could working with me help you achieve it?
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