What?! You're Serializing a Memoir on Substack?

Yes, and I have no idea what I'm doing, but guess what...

Do I know what I’m doing? Hell, no. This is all a huge experiment.

That’s the frightening and exhilarating thing about it.

Being an entrepreneur gets you a little bit accustomed to these feelings, and pretty much on a daily basis. And I’ve been an entrepreneur for the past two-and-a-half decades.

With what’s happening (and not happening) these days in the corporate publishing world, how to get a book you’ve written into readers’ heads and hands seems to be pretty much anyone’s guess. So why not experiment?

The voices of experience (agents, editors and marketing people) tell you each writer needs to have (or build) a platform. Not having what might be termed a robust following on social media, that could present a challenge.

Fortunately, serializing the story frames of my book via Substack is doing just that for me – and it’s making it interactive and fun.

From zero to over 18,500 views, I can actually feel momentum sitting at my little kitchen table in the farmlands of Portugal, staring at the numbers on the screen.

I am finding my readers, just as the voices of experience instruct us to. And they are full of surprises.

• Who they are surprises me (Really, men are reading & recommending a memoir written by a woman?!)

• Readers sharing and recommending my emerging memoir surprises me. (Really, crime novelists are recommending my Substack?!)

People – many of whom I have never met – are reading and heart-ing and re-stacking and commenting and asking questions about my tales of working in documentary film and television. Sometimes, they share a tale of their own experience working with someone I’ve written about.

They are riding along with me for the adventure of seeing how my story unfolds. They are watching the process of a book coming together. And in so doing, they have become a part of the process themselves.

This enriches us all. Together, reader by reader, we are building a community around A Storyboard Life. It’s more fun with friends.