The Story of Our Story

“What’s your major?”

“English Lit.”

“So you’re going to be a teacher?”

“Nope.”

“Oh.” (Insert a long awkward pause here.) “So what are you going to do then?”

Between the years of 2005 - 2007, I can’t tell you the number of times I had this exact conversation. Over and over again. And while no one said it in these exact words, I knew what they were really saying: “Your degree is worthless.”

And having that scenario play out over and over again planted an even more insidious thought in my brain: “You can’t be a writer.”

Even though I had wanted to be a writer since childhood, when I spent hours writing out my own stories in homemade books stapled together for the binding, or drawing characters I had created to keep myself entertained during church service, this thought grew and grew in my head like a weed, choking out the hopes and dreams I had for being a professional writer.

I thought, “They’re right. If I really wanted to be a writer, maybe I should’ve majored in journalism. Or even marketing at the very least. I’ll have to be content to write as a hobby.”

So that’s what I did. And since I had accepted the “fact” that I couldn’t be a writer, I needed to scramble to figure out some other life plan.

Since I no longer was encumbered with school responsibilities and had a blank slate ahead of me, I decided that now was the time for me to make a difference in the world. The day after graduation, I started working in the foster care system, assuming I’d do that for four years max while I tried to figure out what I “really” wanted to do since I had crossed out “writer” in my brain.

I met an amazing young woman the next year who thankfully said she would marry me in 2010 and two months after making our vows, we decided to buy a children’s exercise business for her to run. With business expenses looming over us, it wasn’t the time for me to leave social work. We needed at least one regular paycheck — small as it was — while building up the business. So I continued to dabble in writing as a hobby and, on the plus side, I got to write as part of my job since I was responsible for updating the volunteer training manual and our agency policies and procedures. Exciting stuff, right?

But the weed-thought was entrenched in my brain: “You can’t be a professional writer. See? You’re stuck in social work now. You missed your chance. Idiot.”

My four year plan for being a social worker had turned into six years before I knew it. And I still had no idea what I wanted to really do for the rest of my life. My resume was now filled with almost seven years’ worth of social work experience…not writing. The dream grew fainter and fainter.

But things started to change in early 2013 when my wife and I had started the process to adopt our first child. About a year before, I had helped one of my wife’s colleagues with rewriting some of the brochures for her business since she had been impressed with my writing on our own brochures and website. I think she paid me something like $200 for my time, which I don’t remember asking for, but it was nice of her and gave me an idea. Maybe there were other people who needed things like this done and I could earn some extra money to put towards our adoption expenses?

I joined a copywriting website where I could bid for quick writing jobs — product descriptions for eBay, real estate listings, content blogs for various websites. The pay was modest, maybe $25 or $50 per assignment, but hey, money was money and every little bit helped us out. Plus, I could usually knock out one of the assignments in two hours or less, so it was worth it, especially when I occasionally had a higher paying job of $75 or even $100. On average, I was probably making an extra $100 to $150 a month to put towards expenses.

In other words, I wasn’t getting rich or paying the bills, but I was technically making money by writing. Whodathunk? That pesky thought-weed in my brain started to shrink a little…but just a little.

One of the lies I believed for so long was,

“You can only call yourself a writer if you get published by a traditional book company.”

Rubbish.

By early 2015, it was abundantly clear that I had to get out of social work. I wasn’t making enough to support my family, we had decided to sell our business the previous fall so my wife could focus on our son’s needs, and I was an emotional wreck. Struggling with anxiety and depression for much of my life, the compassion fatigue and secondary trauma of social work had really taken a toll on my mental health. I was working 70 - 80 hours a week on a salary barely acceptable for a single person and I was literally turning gray from the stress.

My heart turned to writing again, but how was I going to find a full-time writing job with the very limited professional experience I could put on my resume? Yes, I could highlight the writing aspects of my jobs, but still…it wasn’t very realistic. I applied for almost any full-time writing jobs that I found — and heard back from none of them.

So I decided to do the next best thing — I took a sales job for a media company that created video content. I initially had applied for a writing job and then learned that they had just made an offer to someone, so I took the sales job instead. The pay was a little bit better than in social work, the hours were much better (which would free up time for me to do some writing hopefully), and maybe a writing role would open up again later on.

That was never to be and probably best that it wasn’t. While I met with the head of the writing department on multiple occasions when they were hiring, it was just never quite the right fit — and frankly, I was making more to support my family in sales than I would as a writer.

In late 2016, I decided to learn how to self-publish on Amazon. I felt like it would be a worthwhile skill and good practice for whenever I would eventually write a novel. My first self-published book was a collection of one-act plays I had written in high school and early college. And then I followed that up with a collection of poetry I had written throughout college. I didn’t really care if any copies sold or not for either of these books — it was all about honing my skills as an editor and learning how self-publishing (and publishing in general) worked. Since they were all old works, I could approach them more critically as an editor rather than as the writer.

In 2017, I decided I wanted to pursue making some money through writing again. I revisited the old website I had used back in 2013 but there had been a lot of changes — the available jobs were few and far between, largely uninteresting, and didn’t pay enough for me to want to spend the time on them. I wanted to be able to actually interact with the clients and hear their stories, so that’s when I came up with the idea of Wordrobe Media.

My idea was that I wanted to help people find the right words to fit their needs and tell their story to the world. My initial thought was that I could go after my own clients — after all, there had never been more demand for writers as every business was jumping on the content and SEO bandwagon in their marketing. Maybe I could help people write their web content, tell their story to the world, and turn that into a full-time business? Others had done it, why not me? There were plenty of local businesses that probably needed help with their websites and now I had several years of sales experience to help me on that side of things.

To build some cred and experience, though, I did some free work for an old friend who was starting up a business, helping him with the copy for his website — but he pretty much ignored all of my suggestions and things went nowhere. And then I did some discounted work for a lady who helped political candidates with content creation, but I felt icky about it, so I made the choice to discontinue that arrangement after fulfilling the orders I had already agreed to.

I was wracking my brain — how was I going to get writing clients? I was truly at a loss for how I was actually going to grow my business without having to pour forty plus hours into it every week while still working a full-time job.

The biggest breakthrough came when a coworker at the media company approached me one day and said, “Hey, I heard you do some writing. I’ve been working on a children’s book for a few years but I don’t know if it’s any good. Would you mind reading it and giving me some thoughts?”

Honestly, I was really nervous about this. I’d had some uncomfortable situations in the past giving honest critiques to friends and it hadn’t always been received well. Writers can be sensitive, myself included. What was I going to do if her book was terrible? This was someone I had to see literally every day and who I liked as a person. I didn’t want to sour the friendship.

But I really didn’t have a good excuse to not look at the book, so I said, “Sure, send it over to me.”

I’m so glad I did. Because not only was her book really great, but I immediately had some ideas on how it could be improved. I gave her my notes and she was thrilled with the suggestions. “Could you help me self-publish it?” My answer was a resounding yes.

In the fall of 2017, she became my first “client.” And it had been such a fun experience that a lightbulb went off for me…what if I could do this for other people but get paid for it? This was way more exciting than writing product descriptions for eBay or copy for politicians. Not just because the work was fun but because of what it was capable of doing for the client. This lined up so much better with my vision for Wordrobe Media to help people tell their stories.

My first paid client has now written three books — I worked on the first two. She gets regular passive monthly income from those books. Plus, it’s opened up professional opportunities for her to be on podcasts, speak at conferences, and one of her books was even added to a college course syllabus. Honestly, the joy I get from seeing that kind of success for a self-published author is so much better than the little bit that I made from the job.

But still, it’s nice to get paid for your work, so I started looking for other opportunities to keep helping people bring their book ideas to life. For a few months, I worked with a writing program at a prestigious university helping their students get their books ready for publishing. It was a lot of work but helped me build up more credibility since by the end of those months, I could honestly say that I had worked on over ten books and even send people the Amazon links to check out.

Fast forward to 2020 and I was able to leverage that experience into a semi-regular ghostwriting gig with a publisher. I got my first couple of contracts with them that year and earned about $5,000 over the course of about six months, plus what I made from my self-publishing clients.

While my family certainly couldn’t live off of that quite yet, I realized that I could finally kill the thought-weed in my brain and tell people, “I’m a writer. And yes, I actually make money from it.” After all, I now had clients who knew me only for my writing, and I had more work and opportunity rolling in that eventually led me to where I am today as a full-time writer.

I know this is long, but I think it’s important to have the story of Wordrobe Media here in one post, even though I’ll revisit aspects in more detail in other posts. My story disproves so much of the typical garbage you’ve heard about being a professional writer. It took me a long time to squash those lies, and I often think about how much sooner I could’ve been a full time writer if I’d recognized them as lies sooner.

And that’s the purpose behind this blog — to empower you as a fellow writer to embrace your full potential. Your story won’t be the same as mine and that’s okay. Because one of the lies I believed for so long was, “You can only call yourself a writer if you get published by a traditional book company.”

Rubbish.

For a long time, I let negative thoughts write my story instead of taking control and writing it myself. If nothing else, I hope my story — the story of Wordrobe Media — inspires you as you write the next word of your own story.