We were lucky to catch up with Skip Press recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Skip, thanks for joining us today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?
I’ve made a living writing and editing for decades. I’m currently writing a Substack called “Chasing Mark Twain” that explains about a decade and a half of that journey. I’m lucky, I guess – I knew I’d be a writer when I was seven years old. It wasn’t easy because all my family were against it. Jealousy, sorry to say, based on their own failed dreams.
I ended up in the cult of Scientology due to abandonment by my famiily. I learned a lot of lessons about what to avoid there – mostly avoid Scientology – and then I went on a game show and won a lot of money and a new car, setting me up to write full-time. About ten years later, with ups and downs in Hollywood that included thinking I was going to star in a biopic about a famous musician, I met the woman I’d been looking for and got married. We had two kids in short order and a stable family, which made all the difference in my life.
I soon began selling books instead of screenplays and articles (although I still do both) and made a transition to teaching and advising other writers, which I still do. I’m known in many countries as a writing expert, and I make a happy living.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I wrote several volumes of my Writers Guide to Hollywood books, several volumes of my Complete Idiots Guide to Screenwriting (including in Russian), and several editions of my book How To Write What You Want & Sell What You Write. That last book came from a class I taught at UCLA Extension Writers Program.
I was asked to teach an online screenwriting course and did that for almost 10 years, with my course based on my book available in up to 1500 schools online. I also taught other writing courses online and in “brick and mortar.”
In 2020 I co-founded a space on Quora called Ask A Screenwriter that gathered over 600,000 followers in a year. i don’t do it any more, long story, but I added up how many people my boos and courses had helped and it was half a million people.
I help people find the theme of anything they are writing and build their story to a satisfying whole that is marketable and satisfying to the writer and their public. It’s very fulfilling. Now I’m also an editor on Reedsy with 17 five-star happy clients.
Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?
I fell into teachnig. I was the VP of the Independent Writers of Southern California and we put on a 48-hour screenwriting marathon at the Century City Marketplace in Los Angeles and were featured on Showtime. Filling in for a member writing up until midnight, I found out the taught at UCLA Extension Writers Program, the largest of its kind in the world. After learning more about me, she suggested I teach there, too. So I did, calling my class How To Write What You Want & Sell What You Write. I got all kinds of students who wanted to write something but sometimes couldn’t decide what.
In those days, aspiring authors weren’t invited to the annual Book Expo, but I found out you could say you were a librarian and get in. So I went around meeting publishers and the owner of Career Press agreed with me that my course sounded like a book, and gave me a deal. The book was a basic primer of the basics of writing non-fiction, novels, stage plays, screenplays, and other types of writing – all of which I’d sold successfully. Various printings sold for years.
The lesson? Trust your instinct. Play to your strengths. Find people who share your vision, and will get involved. You’ll win.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
Because of all the books I’ve written about selling to Hollywood, with a huge number of fans and clients I’ve helped get started, I still get one question repeatedly – “Will they steal my idea?”
My stock answer is – “If they can.”
Hollywood is a copycat town, with too many executives ready to sell some same old cookie-cutter “standard fare” – like a bunch of misfit superheroes or not so super jammed together to stop a super-villain who wants to destroy a city, a country, the Earth, or the universe – because they believe the public is stupid enough to never get tired of that. Or zombies.
But they won’t teal that from you. If you come up with a great original idea they think will please the public, they’ll try to sell that. The same goes for helping out people without protecting yourself. I wrote about the latter in a story on Medium called “Hollywood Karma Has Long Teeth.” Go to Hollywood with your ideas, prepare for a long haul, and please protect yourself.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.skippress.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skippress/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GeneralLeeFunny/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skippress
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeXMDlMTp55McgoJcyT1HCg
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/skippress/