Authors In The Media With Craig DiLouie

Back in the summer I did a Q&A with thriller, sci-fi & apocalyptic horror author Craig DiLouie which you can read by clicking on this link here https://booknotions.com/qa-with-craig-dilouie/ . Mickey Mikkelson connected us again. In this edition of Authors In The Media we will go in depth discussing his career as a magazine editor & advertising executive! 

Q: Craig, can you explain what you did as an advertising executive? It sounds so impressive and important! 

A: [laughs] It sounds much more impressive than it is, though it was quite an exciting opportunity for someone like me, fresh out of college and searching for a calling.

My communications career started at a small ad agency in Princeton, NJ, where I made next to nothing in terms of salary in their public relations department. The agency was growing, however, because the owners had contacts in the lighting industry, and there was an impressive energy efficiency revolution happening.

They tell you to never specialize early in your career, but I knew that if I learned the lighting business, it would advance faster at that agency, and that’s what happened. I worked unbelievable hours, took as much compensation in experience as I could get, and made plenty of youthful mistakes. Overall, I had a great time and learned a great deal there. The biggest thing holding me back was I looked very young up until the age of thirty, and I’ve been socially awkward up until the age of, well, now. It was hard to be taken seriously, but the owners saw value in what I was doing and took that seriously if nothing else, and I was able to advance fairly quickly. After five years, I ran a department of twelve people on the copy side of the business, and I wrote and published a book about lighting energy efficiency with a small trade press.

This led to me being recruited by Miller Freeman, Inc. to serve as editor of their magazine ARCHITECTURAL LIGHTING. You’d be amazed how many trade magazines existed back then and probably still do in one format or another. It was a small publication, published quarterly, and it had plenty of challenges, but moving to New York City and running a magazine as its editor-in-chief? I thought about that one for about a single minute before accepting.

Q: Can you give me a list of magazines you’ve edited for? 

A: Pretty much that just ARCHITECTURAL LIGHTING, which I managed for seven years as its editor and then publisher before our big conglomerate got bought by another big conglomerate, which led to the usual heads rolling.

Since then, I’ve been working at home in my pajamas providing education, marketing copywriting, and journalism services to the lighting industry, which I’m well suited to and have loved doing, besides my growing career writing fiction notably with Hachette Book Group. On the journalism side, I write for several magazines and spent a few years doing freelance editing for a magazine called ILLUMINATE. On the education side, I help manage a consortium providing education about lighting controls, for which I write most of their courses and pretty much everything else, short of washing the dishes.

Q: In our Q&A you answered, For my fiction writing, it taught me to write every day with discipline and to consider craft, not just write with abandon whenever the muse struck like lightning. Would you say that your magazine editing helped with your writing your novels? 

A: The usual grammar stuff I should have paid more attention to in high school and college, but mostly, as I said, writing copy for a living taught me to treat writing as craft instead of a manic, convulsive art. It taught me to consistently produce with a consistent quality, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.

Q: Would you ever go back to being an advertising executive and magazine editor or have you moved on from that to focus on your writing?

A: One should never say never, but yeah, I can say that at this point I will never go back. I am very fortunate to earn a substantial living working at home with the flexibility to juggle a stable career writing nonfiction and the more roller-coaster ride of professionally writing fiction. When I look back at how far I’ve come in my life, I feel absolutely lucky, privileged, or blessed, maybe all three.

Q: What wisdom have you learned in your career as an advertising executive and magazine editor have you learned that you would love for anyone to know whether they were going into those careers or not?

A: Honestly, it would be the same advice I give those who ask me for advice about how to get ahead as a professional fiction writer. Over the years, people have asked me, “How does one achieve success as an author?” The pat, pandering answer I’ve heard many successful authors give is, “Just do what I did,” which I’ve been guilty of giving myself at one point or another thinking I was being helpful, but the truth is it doesn’t work like that.

The best advice I could ever give, really, is to work hard, produce and get yourself and your work out there, and then hope that luck goes your way. It really does boil down to luck, whether it’s where you start in life by birth and genes to where you live to opportunities coming your way all the way to being at the right place at the right time for that life-changing career breakthrough. That being said, I do believe you can optimize your luck by working hard and smart.

Another thing to think about is that becoming skilled at almost anything takes practice. Some people are born with genius for this or that, but most of us aren’t. There is a prejudice that some things do and don’t require practice. For example, a violinist would not be expected to play Mozart on their first go, but many writers think they are “good” or “bad” after writing their first novel. Like anything else, the more you do something, the more your brain adapts to it, and the better you get at it. So, if you have passion for something and want to get ahead, I guess another bit of advice would be to recognize you are better today than you were yesterday, but you are not as good as you will be tomorrow. As they say, if at first you don’t succeed, keep trying. If you love what you do, this won’t be that hard.

On a final note, if I could go back in time to give my younger self advice, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with something, because when I was young, I hadn’t yet learned how little I knew, but I would tell myself to get over the impostor syndrome and put myself out there. I’ve seen many people get ahead in their fields in large part by sheer attitude alone. I’ve never been good at faking it until I’m making it, but I think there’s something to it. Especially as a fiction writer, I really wish I’d started going to writing conferences and networking far sooner than I did.