Writing and Publishing My First Novel: The Road Was Long ... With Many a Winding Turn

For around 20 years, I worked as a college professor teaching courses in areas of journalism, mass communications, advertising, and marketing. Then, after working as a professional in my career fields of marketing/ journalism/ advertising/public relations--for a lot of years, about ten years ago, I made the same decision you've made: to become a writer of novels.

In addition to having conducted a national research study as the foundation for writing my doctoral dissertation (which is book-length), in more recent years I've also written about seven of a ten-novel collection. I chose to self-publish the first book in my collection in December of 2011 (Silver: Currents of Change), and I self-published Book Two (Gold, The Heat of Refinement) in 2015, through another company. My plan, however, is to re-release both of my first two books, soon (with new covers), using either Amazon.com's self-publishing platform, or Ingram Spark, another print-on-demand company. I want to own my own work, so I'm choosing not to go the traditional publishing route for now. Maybe one day in the future (but maybe not).

The drawing you see to the left is a sketch of the cover of my third novel, which I have completed and will be publishing later this year. I have been writing articles and books and telling stories my whole life, either in my head or actually putting them down on paper. And, even though I've known my whole life that I wanted to become a writer of fiction novels, it took a while for me to actually commit to doing it.

I grew up in Mississippi, and at age 18, I went to college. I studied journalism as an undergraduate and earned a bachelors degree in mass communications. Although I was committing myself to writing, it was a different kind of writing from what I'd always dreamed of doing. Still, it took full commitment of time and effort to learn what I needed to know to become a journalist. After getting my B. S. degree, I worked for a several years in magazine publishing, as a writer and editor. Then, I went back to school to work on getting a masters degree in English, preparing to focus at least some of my time on writing fiction. But, a lack of commitment to these plans soon came between me and that degree. What happened? After completing about two-thirds of a masters in English, I caught the "copy writing bug" and decided to get my masters degree in advertising, instead of English.

I left Mississippi and started pursuing a new masters degree at the University of Illinois, in Urbana. There, I was among a blessed group of graduate students called James Webb Young Scholars (we were recipients of the competitive James Webb Young Fellowship). James Webb Young (1886-1973) was a "Mad Man" way before advertising professionals became so popular on television. The very first chairman of the Ad Council, Young was voted Advertising Man of the Year in 1946, long before I was even born. He wrote several books, and one of them became part of my reading material when I was studying advertising (A Technique for Producing Ideas, Waking Lion Press, 2009). That little book gave me a whole new way of viewing the creative process, and I'm glad my study of advertising gave that to me. In fact, I enjoyed everything about my years at U of I, and there I not only completed my masters in advertising, I also took courses in literature, once again fueling and feeding my dreams of becoming a writer of novels. (Link to read my short story pictured below)

As it turned out, even though I loved (and still love) advertising, I wasn't all that committed to the idea of becoming an ad agency copywriter. After getting my masters in advertising, I became a college professor of mass communications. Then, after a few years of doing that, I took some time away from teaching and worked for a few years as an ad agency researcher and a copywriter, but soon went back to teaching. However, a connection I made while working for a Dallas ad agency became an important part of my future. Still, for many more years, I worked as a college professor teaching courses in advertising, public relations, and marketing communications, at three different universities (I couldn't even commit to working at one school!). After teaching full-time for more than a decade, I decided to go back to school, again, to complete a doctorate in business (with a specialization in marketing). Whew!

Several years after getting my doctorate, I decided to leave full-time teaching. You see, even though I was good at teaching, and even though my students and I won several national advertising and marketing competitions with very big and impressive prizes and recognition, it turns out I was never fully committed to the idea of being a college professor. So, I started working for corporations and businesses in areas of marketing communications where I held jobs as a marketing and/or communications manager or director. I even worked in international marketing for one company. As a sideline, I also spent many years working in magazine publishing as a writer, editor, and graphic designer. I also started writing for Hub Pages, and I've published several of my short stories and a lot of other types of non-fiction articles there. Hub Pages is owned by Maven, and my profile site is: https://hubpages.com/@drmiddlebrook.

 I'll tell your more about my journey in my next post.