My 50th Publishing Anniversary
February 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of my first published article. The article appeared in The Freeman: "Domestic Inflation versus International Solvency."
Just for the record, according to the inflation calculator of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the consumer price index in the United States has risen by a factor of 7.3 since 1967.
I had begun writing book reviews in the local newspaper, the Riverside, California Press Enterprise, in 1965. I was paid five dollars for the book review, and I got to keep the book. The article in The Freeman was the first time I had ever been paid a significant amount of money, and also the first time that one of my articles had appeared in a national magazine. Back then, the magazine paid two cents a word. It therefore paid to write long articles. The article had 2,333 words. That meant I was paid about $45, or about $330 in today's money. I was in grad school, and I needed the money.
I had no idea in 1967 that, over the next 50 years, I would write something in the neighborhood of 14,000 articles, plus about 60 books.
I have written most of those articles since 2006, the year that I began my online subscription website, Gary North's Specific Answers. I write 24 articles a week for that site. I used to write 30 articles a week, but I decided to slack off a little bit. I got away with it. The subscribers did not cancel their subscriptions because of this reduction.
For those of you who want to be writers, it is a lot easier today than when I began. Today, anyone can start a free blog site, and he can start writing immediately.
When I designed the Ron Paul Curriculum, I decided to get students publishing early. A student who goes through the entire curriculum will post well over 1,000 weekly essays on his or her blog site. Any student who writes 1,000+ essays is going to master the basics of writing. That student will go to college with a crucial skill that very few college freshmen possess, and which very few college seniors possess.
The earlier that a student gets into the habit of writing on a weekly basis, the sooner the student will build up a portfolio of published materials that can serve as an effective addition to a résumé.
It still amazes me that most people do not work to build up a portfolio of articles for their résumés. These days, you had better be able to separate your résumé from all the rest that arrive in the inboxes of American corporations. If you are going to be on LinkedIn, you had better have links to your articles in your LinkedIn résumé.
Most people do not want to write. Nevertheless, they post on Facebook. If they have something to say that is worth posting on Facebook, it is worth writing a 500-word article about.
Anyone can get started on WordPress.com for free. It is unlikely that that site will ever go off-line. I think it is a permanent way to post articles. If you are not doing this, you ought to be doing it.
As it turned out, I wrote my way into my first full-time job: a senior staff member at the Foundation for Economic Education, which published The Freeman. So, I speak from experience regarding the power of the printed word in advancing your career.
You don't have to start big. You can start small. Provide summaries of other people's articles, and then provide links to those articles. That is a lot easier than writing book reviews. Google and other search engines will enable people to find you. This is the modern operational principle of the remnant, which Albert J. Nock wrote about in 1937: "Isaiah's Job."
Even if you don't have the career success in writing that I have had, you will leave a permanent legacy online. You never know who is going to be helped by that legacy.
More than any other time in human history, the World Wide Web now offers permanent written legacies to people who want to write. I suggest that you become one of these people.