How I almost became one of those "writing gurus" you hate

I was a novelist. Social media almost made me a telemarketer.

When I joined Substack about a year ago, it felt different. It wasn’t like the other girls social media sites. People were sharing their writing and happily chatting about things that interest them and making connections. You know, what the Internet used to be before sponsorships and ad revenue and TikTok shop turned us all into Home Shopping Network hosts.

Alas, I fear that’s already lost, or at least it’s not quite the same. Six months ago, I liked Substack notes. I deliberately skip them now. There are still some gems, but it’s mostly “follow me to learn how I got so many people to follow me.” Yawn.

I can’t judge, though. Back in 2020, I almost because an online course guru.

What if you could make tens of thousands of dollars a month in passive income? No, I’m not talking about playing the stock market or investing in Mittcoin. You don’t have to have an education in finance or business or economics. The real money is in….

TEACHING.

Yes! Being a teacher is the key to wealth and prosperity! Shhhh don’t tell the ones working sixty hour weeks in public schools for a very underwhelming annual salary. They have, like, degrees in education. You don’t need that to make millions teaching. Did you know the online course industry is projected to be worth more than Jeff Bezos’s cat’s net worth in 2028?

You get the idea.

So, here I am in March 2020. I’ve started a YouTube channel, mostly because I want to make videos about writing. I’ve always been a teacher: I have a bachelor’s degree in music education, I’ve taught middle and high school band, I taught ESL overseas, I’ve taught creative writing workshops. To me, at this point, an online course is just a course I would teach in a classroom, but online, with Skype (I didn’t know what Zoom was at the time).

And as March turns to April, to May, and the pandemic news doesn’t get any less scary, I’m worried about a lot of things and one of those things is money.

Because I’m a freelancer, I ghostwrite books for a living, and I don’t know if that work is going to dry up during the pandemic. I’m scared that summer is going to hit and I’m going to have literally no work and no income. So starting that channel was really my pandemic distraction project. I put a ton of time into it instead of doomscrolling every day, and I watched a ton of super helpful videos about building a YouTube channel.

And the more I got into it, the more I found creators who added a neat extra step: Here’s how you build a YouTube channel…and use it as a marketing tool to funnel people into your online course, where you make jillions of dollars in your sleep.

And I thought…tell me more.

They hooked me. They put out these (again, very helpful) videos about growing on YouTube, peppered with videos about online courses, always with links to a free webinar.

And at some point you’re like, free webinar, cool, I’ll check it out. I can’t tell you how many of these I watched. I cannot stress this enough: They are all exactly the same.

These webinars are prerecorded but they pretend to be live. You register and they send you a link that will only work at a pre-determined time, and you open it and the video starts at that time and the guru is all “Hey guys!” greeting everyone in the chat, because yes there’s a chat going, but weirdly when you try typing into it you never actually see your message? Talk about red flags…nothing wrong with a prerecorded webinar, but why do they want you to think it’s live? (There’s a reason—more on that in a minute.) Anyway, once the slideshow starts it takes about 45 minutes but I’ll save you the time and tell you how it goes.

First the guru tells you their life story, focused on them hitting their lowest point financially and personally and professionally, then becoming a rich baller online course creator with a Lamborghini they probably rented just to take a photo in front of for this slide. 

Then they promise to teach you how to do it too! For free!

And here are the steps they give you:

1. Figure out what it is that you can teach others to do because you’ve been successful at it. Something you figured out a process for. Training your dog, self-publishing a book, line dancing like a boss, whatever. 

2. Outline your process. (This is called lesson planning in teacher-world, but if you’re an online course guru, you’re better than a teacher so you don’t call it that.) 

3. Set a premium price. Premium meaning bare minimum $500, but over $1k is preferred. Sales psychology is at play here—if people see a low price, they assume your course is trash. And maybe it is? You don’t actually know yet because you haven’t taught anyone but if you charge four easy payments of $997.97 people will assume your course is premium and they’ll be more willing to (booming voice) INVEST IN THEMSELVES. 

4. Find a few pawns students willing to pay this wild price and teach them your process live (virtually or in person). Use them this experience to work out the kinks of your course. 

5. Film some video lessons of your process. Put them up online with that fat price tag and get your handful of students to act as your ambassadors and invite others to throw their money at you (maybe give them an affiliate link so they make a little cash and have a little incentive. Then those students recruit more students, and those students recruit more oh my god can you see how much this resembles a pyramid scheme??) The idea is that if your students are happy and out there recruiting more students you don’t have to pay for advertising and again, this is very clever, and frankly I know I, along with probably most of you, am WAY more likely to sign up for something that a friend of mine personally recommended to me than if I just saw a Facebook ad or whatever. 

6. The webinar ends with an inspirational slideshow of the guru’s ambassadors all with their Lamborghinis filled with piles of cash and then says you can go out now and try this OR you can (booming voice) INVEST IN YOURSELF AND YOUR BUSINESS and have a MUCH better chance at success if you…wait for it…

   enroll in the guru’s online course…

   where they teach you how to build an online course…

   for four easy payments of $997.97.

Oh but enrollment is only open for the next three hours.

So like, make that decision. Now.

This is why they want you to think that webinar is live. Because if you realize it’s prerecorded, you also realize enrollment is always open. Just sign up for the webinar again and magically, you’ll get another three hours. 

It’s called scarcity marketing. That’s why they pretend the webinars are live. And you know, we don’t tend to think about “limited time” sales in general as being scammy (even though I have to say…it is, kind of? Most of those sales aren’t real. If a product is at a price, that is the price the retailer has placed on it. That crossed out number of the “original” price is to make us focus on the money we’re “saving” by purchasing this thing we proooobably don’t actually need).

The lengths these gurus go to to convince you this webinar is live really doesn’t sit right with me, and I think even early on in me getting into all this stuff, this was a red flag I saw, I noticed…but I chose to ignore it. 

The hilarious thing is that when you really go far down this rabbit hole, there are some people out there who have taken these online courses and launched moderately successful courses of their own about writing or dancing or crafting…but so many of them launch their own online course about building an online course. I swear sometimes I think those are the only online courses that actually make decent money.

I’m not saying that this model is by nature a scam. It highly depends on the price and the actual value of the course content. Even if the course includes zero interaction or feedback, like it’s entirely video on demand, I don’t think that’s necessarily a scam. I mean, it’s not scammy to create a thing and put it out there for sale over and over again. In fact, it’s kinda like…publishing books. Royalties. Residual income. Hey.

One thing a lot of online course gurus point out that I agree with is that a lot of the value is time. Yes, you can learn almost anything for free online. But it will take you a ton of time to sift through all the garbage and actually find the good info. If a course is truly good, and it can teach you how to do something very specific, in a very effective way, in a very condensed amount of time? Yeah, that’s worth something. 

So picture me spring of 2020 freaking out over the world and also money and my career. All this stuff got in my head. And I thought, okay. I’ve taught literally hundreds of creative writing workshops. I could make a really good one, film it once, put it up online, and make that sweet sweet passive income every month. It was such a soothing thought at the time.

I got to work. I had a course idea, a topic, a name (not gonna tell you what it was, too embarrassing, but let’s just say I had a Canva folder full of graphics). I had an extensive Google doc where I was outlining and scripting it out. The only thing freaking me out was the price, because $500 minimum was drilled into my head and the idea of charging that scared me.

The closer I got to not finishing it, the less I wanted to work on it. So by July 2020, I’d just stopped. I had a moment one day, cannot remember what triggered it exactly, but well…you guys remember summer of 2020, right? It was awful. And my overall feeling had shifted from self-protective fear to a desire to make the world a tiny bit less shitty in whatever way I could. I had gone from a place of selfish fear (selfish in a not necessarily negative way, because it’s okay to worry about your finances and your health and your well-being during a pandemic) to more okay, my work is still going fine and if there are people out there who are trying to write their first novel while the world is on fire, I want to help them and I don’t want to charge an obscene amount of money to do it. 

And money mindset is a HUGE thing in this online course guru world. The basic thing they want you to get your head around is that it’s not selfish to want wealth, and that the more wealth you have and the bigger your business, the more people you can serve. All true. But so much of that depends on what you’re offering. I’ve seen fairly pricey courses where the creator has a team of workers and they are giving serious attention and value to those who enroll. But that’s not always the case. It’s not selfish to want wealth. It IS selfish to slap together a course on something you haven’t mastered yourself, then target newbies to the field and charge them hundreds or thousands of dollars with big promises you can’t deliver on.

I never went back to the online course thing. Around this time, I started getting sponsorship offers for my YouTube channel, which was something I was interested in—but suddenly, I didn’t want that at all. The thought of getting in front of my camera and hocking a product—even a great, useful product!—to whoever watched my videos made me not want to make videos at all.

I love writing. I love editing. I love talking to writers and editors about writing and editing. But being a writer online right now, no matter where I go (including Substack, sadly)…it feels like someone is slipping an arm around my shoulder and telling me I, too, can soon buy my first Lamborghini if I just do these three steps, follow me to learn more click my link for ten percent off.

This is a topic I’d like to explore more in future posts, and I’d love to hear your thoughts! For now, let’s end on an ironic tag in which I try to sell you my services.

Want me to critique your work? Query and synopses critiques are $30; email me at mischubooks@gmail.com!

The posts I publish here will remain free. But I have a series called Ask the Editor, which will publish every other Friday. The short pitch: Dear Abby for writers.

The longer pitch: paid subscribers ($5/month or $50/year, cancel anytime) will receive a link to a form where they can submit pretty much anything within a two page limit. Things like…

• Queries

• Synopses

• Pages from their novel

• Questions about writing or traditional publishing

• A current problem or situation in their writing journey (ie: trying to decide if an agent is a schmagent, disagreeing with beta feedback, etc)

• A rant about this whole “trying to get published” endeavor to a sympathetic ear

Every other Friday, I’ll respond to/critique as many submissions as I can and publish them together in one post. Because they’ll be behind a paywall, there’s some privacy—your query, pages, or rant about that one really horrible rejection won’t be online for editors to discover when they Google you.

That’s it! I hope to see you over there. :)

Michelle