Entrepreneurship

 

As many of you know, I have an MBA as well as a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing, and I’ve always been interested in business. I spent the first twenty years of my career in real estate construction and then software development, before transitioning into another twenty years as a college professor.

Even while teaching English, I managed to bring in my business background. I taught other faculty members how to use technology—building websites and explaining computer learning platforms. In my last years I was part of a program to teach students about entrepreneurship.

That was particularly fun because I have been an entrepreneur ever since I was in college. In the mid-1970s, Lacoste shirts were just becoming fashionable, and through my mother I discovered an outlet store in Quakertown, PA that sold Lacoste seconds. Many of these shirts had nearly imperceptible flaws—maybe improper stitching on the placket, for example. The shirts were retailing then for about $18, but you could buy them at the quarterly outlet sales for four bucks.

Whenever my mother would get a postcard announcing the sale, I’d take the train from Philadelphia to Quakertown, walk about a mile to the outlet, and fill my backpack and shopping bags with shirts that passed my quality check. Then I’d return to campus and sell them to my friends for eight dollars apiece.

It was a great bargain for them, and I had the thrill of running my own small business. Later on, a friend and I sold cheesecakes by the slice at college fairs. You can read about that business here.

When I transitioned into being a self-published author, I began to learn how to run my writing efforts as a business, and that has been great fun—as well as a great challenge. I have learned that many authors don’t have the background or skill set I do, so I’ve done a lot of teaching in this area.

I’ve decided to start posting this kind of information on Substack a couple of times a month, and you’re welcome to come along for the ride. I hope that the information will be interesting even to casual readers, as you come to understand what’s going on behind the scenes of a writing business.

I promise not to bore you with statistics, and I hope that if you like the narrative voice from my books, leavened with the occasional humor, you’ll stick around.