Get Your Story Out.

New tagline: For a good three years now, I've been going to HealthSouth Rehab Hospital every Sunday and teaching a weekly class called "What's Your Story?" The experience has had a profound effect on me. It's not so much a class as a chance to talk to people about their personal stories. A few of them have been told "you should write a book." More often, they have an idea that they should write something down for their families, but they don't know where to start. Some of them even insist "I don't have a story." Of course they do, and there's nothing more delightful than helping them find it. 

In any case, it got me to think about defining what I do in a different way. My original tagline, which is twelve years old now, is "Making Professional Publishing Accessible—and Fun—for Everyone." To be honest, this is only a fancy version of what I have tended to tell people who ask me what I do: "I help people self-publish their books."

It's true. It's clear. I do help people self-publish their books. But it's not sufficient by a long shot. The patients at HealthSouth have helped me with that. What I really do is help people get their stories out—in multiple senses of that phrase. I get the story out of your head and heart, I help you refine it, and I help you share it with your intended audience. Getting the Story Out is taking me outside the boundaries of bookmaking into blogging, workshopping, presenting, poetry slamming, Facebooking, and letter writing. It gets me, the professional editor, beyond the planet of editing into the universe of marketing. More later. —The Publishing Pro