Re: Anyone tried this in tech writing?

[Chris Morton <salt -dot- morton -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Before moving my family from Northern Lower Michigan (north of Al G.)
and joining the Scottsdale, AZ-based company, one day I received a very
poorly-conceived Windows tips newsletter entitled *The Graunke
ReportâWindows Tips & Secrets*, mass-mailed by Mastering Computers. Perhaps
you saw one of the early efforts, appearing on the scene about the same
time as Brian Livingston's first edition of the bestseller, *Windows
Secrets*.

The newsletter sucked, so I wrote Graunke to let him him know what I
thought about it (more specifically, how I would improve it). After two
get-to-know-ya meetings, hosting a trial *Inside Windows* seminar breakout
session and soloing for a week as a Windows 3.1 instructor at Lyondell
Petrochemical in Houston (a contract held by Mastering), I became *The
Graunke ReportâWindows Tips & Secrets *author, layout artist and production
coordinator. Simultaneously I was touring the country conducting the
company's highly-successful seminars (in a city near you). Over 3-1/2 years
I increased my salary three-fold, so it was a good run.

(I'm only sorry that, like Steve Ballmer, I didn't take out a second
mortgage and buy more M$ stock during that period, where it was splitting
2-for-1 and 3-for-1 every few weeksâa precursor to Googlemania. *Sherman,
set the Wayback Machine.... *And had I been a suck-up, I probably would
have been given some of Mastering's stock before it was sold to Platinum
Technologies for something like $20MM.)

I leveraged my Mastering Computers' experience into a similar gig at
Learning Tree International, sans newsletter (but was freelancing for *Windows
Sources* magazineâwhere I was briefly its "tips" editorâand Cobb Group
newsletters). Those few years at LTree remain the absolute pinnacle of my
career, before that company ran head-on against lower-cost, online training
methodologies and the ubiquity of Windows OS/GUI knowledge.

Anyway, thanks for letting me reminisce a bit. All of that is to say that,
yes, going out on a limb and writing a Magic Bullet letter sometimes works.

Chris




On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 10:39 PM, Erika Yanovich <ERIKA_y -at- rad -dot- com> wrote:

>
> http://blogs.denverpost.com/personalinterest/2012/11/16/forget-cover-letter-write-pain-letter/341/
> Erika
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