How to become a rich and famous writer
How do you become a rich and famous writer like me? It’s quite easy. All you have to do is get started. Get a computer, preferably one with a screen so you can see what rubbish you are writing, and commence typing. More importantly, to quote Winston Churchill: “Never give up.” Don’t let being ignored slow you down. If nothing else, your typing will get faster.
I hate being ignored, which is likely what will happen if you send pitches and proposals to book publishers with the delusion they might read one. Never take “no” for an answer. I share with you the following example. It’s not about writing, but what the hell. What’s that old saying? “Where there is a will, there is a way?” One time in my younger days, before I became the rich and famous author I am today, I was forced to drive a truck for a living. Something to do with having to pay rent. To alleviate the boredom, I would listen to the radio while I drove.
Given that this was long ago, few people at the time had heard of Bruce Springsteen. You know, the musician? This was before he became rich and famous, before you had to sell your car in order to afford to go to his concerts, before Born to Run became a huge bestseller. Local radio station CFOX started a contest for readers to get two free tickets to his upcoming concert. Actually, it wasn’t much of a contest. All you had to do was send in a letter, which probably reduced the number of people wanting to win because you had to know how to lick a stamp.
Rather than trusting the Royal Canadian Mounted Post Office to deliver it, I dropped the letter off myself. I went into the station to hand it personally to the receptionist. She didn’t even look up. “Put in one of those bags over there.”
I looked at the corner of the room. There were half a dozen bags stacked in the corner, constituting what I estimated what were about 10,000 other letters. I put my letter back in my pocket and went home. Stored in my landlady’s garage was a lot of junk, including a door she had pleaded with me to get rid of because it took up too much space. I went to the hardware store and bought a can of white spray paint and painted the door white. In the upper left corner I wrote my name and return address, and in the middle I wrote the CFOX address, with the words Springsteen Tickets on the bottom left, like a giant 3 foot by six foot envelope.
I strapped the door to the top of my car, parked in front of CFOX and walked in carrying the door. This time the receptionist did indeed look up, this time with a look of incredulity on her face. “What the hell is that? Hang on, don’t put it down.” To which I replied: “Ignore this.”
She grabbed the phone and called the station manager. He appeared about three seconds later. “What the hell is that?” he asked. I replied: “Try to ignore this.”
“Wait here a minute,” he replied, and came back immediately with an envelope of his own and handed it to me. I took a quick peek. Yep, two seats to the concert, near the stage. “The door goes,” he said, “and you with it.”
I decided to go to broadcast school and become a DJ myself, so listeners would bring their own doors to my own station. I worked my way up the line to become a DJ, reporter, news editor and announcer, and finally a talk show host. Then I met a lovely young lady and moved to Vancouver to live with her. Thirty five years later we are still together.
There was a small problem in that I did not have a job. No one in radio in Vancouver was hiring at the time, so I decided I would create my own job. I decided to work at a newspaper. In order to avoid the inevitable rejections I decided to start my own newspaper. This came as something of a surprise to my girlfriend, who pointed out some problems to my idea. “You don’t even know how to type.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “I taught myself how to type at my radio job. I’m up to about three words a minute.”
Not to be swayed, she listed off a series of other problems that I would need to overcome in order to become the next William Randolph Hearst. “You have no job, so you have no money. Your car is stored in the carport because you can’t afford insurance. You have never worked for a newspaper. You have no office. You don’t even have a phone. You would need at least 20 people on staff, who won’t work for free. You can’t afford to pay a layout person, never mind a printer. How will you distribute it? That’s just for starters.”
Where there is a will there is a way. I decided not to let such trifles bother me. I had heard of a unique publication in New York called Street News, sold by homeless people on the street in lieu of begging. It was difficult to obtain a copy. They ran the newspaper out of a phone booth on Times Square, I think. It took several phone calls but I eventually received a copy in the mail. It was a piece of rubbish, containing some articles cribbed from the daily newspapers, plus a few “vendor profiles” which really interested me. “Giving a voice to the voiceless,” I thought. I also read their first issue sold 450,000 copies, which interested me even more.
I spent the better part of a year meeting various anti-poverty activists in Vancouver, none of whom expressed any interest whatsoever. “I hate panhandlers,” said one prominent activist. “They are always bugging you for a smoke or spare change. Not interested.’
Aha, I thought! Thank you very much! Spare Change became the name for my newspaper. I wrote all the stories myself, took most of the photos, talked a graphic designer who liked the concept into laying out 20 pages, created a “dummy” and showed it to a printer, who agreed to print 10,000 copies “on spec” in the off chance that I might come back again as a paying customer. I packed 5,000 copies into my girlfriend’s car, which caused the rear end to nearly drag on the ground, went back and got the rest, and stored them all in my own car, which wasn’t going anywhere so it also dragged on the ground.
I met a photographer who worked part time for the Globe and Mail newspaper, who said he knew a reporter who might be interested in a story, who subsequently phoned me and did an interview. The next day the story was on the front page of the Globe. At 4 in the morning I received a phone call. Our phone was in the kitchen, so I answered it in the nude in the dark in a surly voice. “Who the hell is this? Do you know what time it is?”
“This is CKWW, Windsor Ontario,” boomed the voice on the line. “Everybody is talking about your story in the Globe. Tell us all about it.”
The phone didn’t stop ringing for about six months. I did radio, TV and newspaper interviews for several years. I was invited to be Keynote Speaker at the National Anti-poverty Association’s annual national conference. The newspaper sold 750,000 copies over five years, selling out every issue of 10,000 copies. Over time my typing got a little better. I use the index finger on each hand to double my speed.
The story really should be the subject of a motion picture, a rags to riches script without the riches, because the street vendors made all the money while I was stuck with the fame. Finally my girlfriend became my wife and eventually pointed out to me that I had become nationally known as the voice of the homeless, or in other words, a homeless person myself, which she found rather embarrassing. There was also the fact that my circulation managers, street people themselves, were always falling off the wagon and stealing all the money, so I finally quit.
In order to summarize my findings, I wrote and submitted an article to the Vancouver Courier, a high-quality twice-weekly newsmagazine. It was published on the front cover. Then, surprisingly, the editor asked me what else I had to offer. It never occurred to me my article would get published, especially on the front cover, so I wrote a second article. Then about 50 more cover stories. I decided to take a unique style. I would write about subjects that hadn’t happened yet, but I was sure they would happen soon. After a while, my articles actually helped make things happen. I sold every article I ever wrote.
My wife and I moved to lovely Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco. Bored, and not legally allowed to work yet without a Green Card, I wrote a story about housing and sent it to the editor at the prestigious Pacific Sun. I received an immediate phone call and offer to visit the newspaper office for a chat. “Who are you?” said the editor. “I have been looking for an article on this same topic for years. It’s very complex. How long have you lived in Marin County?”
“Uh, about a month,” I said. “It’s just a story about Nimbyism. I wrote about that topic in Vancouver. Nimbyism is everywhere.”
The Sun started to publish my articles, two cover stories and two news reports every month, followed by a cycling column that I turned into an outdoors column and eventually a travel column. I was also asked to write a few biographies for famous local people, which was a different kettle of wax entirely, but rather lucrative. After several years my wife and I moved back to Vancouver for her to become a museum director. Once again I was out of work and had to create a new job. I wrote again for the Courier, and submitted travel articles to the travel editor which were published, and then for the travel sections of the Vancouver Sun and Province. Over the course of a few years I published a few hundred travel articles. Then I wrote an OpEd about cycling to the editor at the Vancouver Sun. It was published, so I wrote another OpEd. Over time I published 41 OpEds on the editorial page of the Sun, often getting my ears boxed in the Letters to the Editor section because my opinions were rather contentious.
One day I had lunch with the editor. I asked him why he published every OpEd I submitted. He was quite frank in response. “It’s because you are a nobody. You aren’t a PR hack for some company, a CEO, or a politician, or an activist with an axe to grind. You are a neutral anonymous freelance journalist. Also, we never get this quality of writing. What else you got?”
What else? Well, I had photos and stories from all my trips around the world. How did I become a travel writer and enjoy free trips to about 50 countries? Well, that would be an entire book in itself. I pitched some travel book proposals to several publishers without the courtesy of a response. So I did what any enterprising person would do, and I self-published my own travel books, posting them for sale on Amazon. This meant finding and paying graphic artists and editors, but what the heck; I simply paid them out of my sales. As a writer I can’t count to ten without taking off my socks, but I think I have published between 20 to 25 books so far, with lots more to come.
Once in a while I pitch book ideas to mainstream publishers, but it usually turns out that while the editors like my writing, they want any books they publish to reflect their own personal opinions. “So kindly rewrite the book, which took you a while to write, for free, and then we will probably want you to continue working on it, for free, on the rare chance it may eventually sell some copies.” Recently, though, I found a publisher that “prints books that others are afraid to publish.” Now, that’s more my style. My new book about China ought to set some people’s hair on fire.
Friends who know of my work call me “prolific.” Well, I am a writer. That’s what I do. That’s what I am doing even as we speak. One day I may even learn how to type, but it seems unlikely. The two fingers I use are getting a bit worn down, but I persevere. I am not rich, nor am I a household name even in my own house, but I get to write whatever I want, whenever I want, and that’s fine with me.
There is a story I heard once about Winston Churchill being hired to give a speech at the graduation of some famous university like Harvard or Yale. He promised to give a speech that “no one will ever forget.” He got up in front of a huge crowd and said. “Never give up. NEVER give up. NEVER give up.” Then he sat down. No one has ever forgotten it. There is something to be learned from that, I think. Now, if you will forgive me, I must go because I have a book on which I am working. Writing about writing, I had almost forgotten what I was working on.