Next step: the Outline

A book proposal is all about content and organization. Some people like mind maps; others prefer outlines. What matters is that either one can be a skeleton to build upon. This book is about my career as a writer, which evolved step by step. It began in 1968 and followed an unpredictable but charmed path through the years. There have been no gaps in my writing, so the outline pretty much wrote itself.

1. 1968-1972 You’ve Got Talent

a. The sentence that changed my life

b. Four-and-a-half-year apprenticeship

2. 1972-1973 Instant Editor

a. Concrete box in the basement

b. Learning the ropes

c. Launching writers

d. Falling apart

3. 1973-1978 The Making of a Writer

a. Cinderella job with one hour for lunch

b. The everything writer

c. No one can live on this

4. 1978-1980 Corporate Culture Shock

a. Open mouth, insert foot

b. Travel to exotic locales

c. The hen house

d. Fired (nothing personal)

5. 1980 Fear & Freelancing

a. Living the good life, temporarily

b. Let’s get real; I need benefits

6. 1980-1982 Disappointed & Dejected

a. Not exactly what I expected

b. Downtown, dismal, depressing

7. 1982-1989 The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

a. Dysfunction with a capital D

b. Peyton place

c. Proving myself

d. Fired, again

8. 1987 - AMA, the Biggest Break

a. Training courses

b. Books

9. 1990 Going Solo

a. Starting out with a bang

b. $1.00 a word

c. You name it, I do it

d. The longest running newsletter

e. Insider, part of the team

10. 2001 The Bottom Drops Out

a. Living on nothing

b. Starting over, again

11. 2005 Reinventing Myself

a. Accidental ghostwriter

b. How to write a nonfiction book

c. Marketing: what a concept

12. 2008 Helping Writers Write

a. Full circle: teaching

b. The friends-of-Bobbi shelf

c. Triumphs & disappointments

It Takes a (Virtual) Team

In my dream of being a freelance writer, I could picture myself conducting interesting interviews, attending stimulating meetings, and sitting alone at my computer for many hours, doing what I love most. That was as far as my dream went. If I ever gave a thought to how I would manage finances, client relationships, or the myriad details of operating a one-person business, I don’t remember those things being part of my fantasy.

I confess that I made the same mistake many creative people make: I believed that if I could earn a living as a writer working for someone else, I could do the same thing working for myself. It’s a flawed concept in that writers and artists and people who bake the best cookies in the world may be masters of our respective crafts, but that is only one-third of the equation.

If I had taken courses in how to run a small business, I might have learned that earlier, but, alas, I did not. I just plunged in and began without having any idea of what I was doing. At first, I was very lucky, landing great corporate clients an earning nice fees. It was a heady experience, proving that I had made the right decision.

It is 20 years later (amazing!), and here is what I have learned, with the help of a dog-eared little book called The E Myth Revisited by Michael E. Berger. The E myth is exactly what I believed when I began: if I could do something well, I could run a business doing it. I was, and am, what Berger calls a “technician” — not too glamorous a label. To be a successful businessperson, I also had to be a manager (to run the business) and an entrepreneur (to dream big dreams and grow the business). In other words, every one-woman band really has to be a three-woman band. If I’m not strong in all three roles (and who is?), I must hire people who are. Right. At those times when I was barely scraping by, hiring two other people wasn’t a very realistic idea.

Fortunately, one learns or one perishes. Some years are better than others; some things are more fun to learn than others. I will never like accounting or collecting money. On the other hand, I have grown to love marketing, especially Internet marketing. I have continued to expand the other two sides of my virtual team because I know that, while I’m busy turning out prose, someone has to let the world know I’m here, buy stamps, send out invoices, file the endless reams of paper I generate, and dream those big dreams.