Introduce Yourself : Failing into a new life and career by George Schwimmer

My biggest failure was producing and directing an Off-Off-Broadway play in 1981. Once the show opened, I was told the casting was exceptional, the production excellent and poetic, the directing and acting great. So, where did I fail:? I hired two women to do publicity for me, and they wound up doing next to nothing, and then I learned that no one in New York would review the production unless it was Equity, which my show was not. I did not have the kind of funds needed to buy ads in newspapers, so the show went down the drain. A year of my life and $17,000 of my own money gone up in smoke. Extremely depressing. As a result, however, I began to write, and since then I've written twenty books, three stage plays, and ten screenplays. Almost all of my writing has been published on Amazon.com, which means my writing will remain available until such time as Amazon folds, which could be hundreds of years from now. In any case, so far 15-20,000 people have read what I've written, and I've earned around $35,000 on book sales, which is not a lot, but it puts me in the top 1% of writers on Amazon. One of my books is a top seller in its category, DOPPELGANGER: The Legend of Lee Harvey Oswald. 80% of my readers give my writing four or five stars. My stage plays and screenplays have drawn quite favorable comments and high placements in writing contests If I had succeeded in New York as a director back then, however, I would not have written a word, as I would not have had the time nor the impetus to sit down and write. My failure pushed me on. That resulted in a moderately successful failure.