I'm Tom Avitabile, and I am the last guy on the planet to ever have a book published. Not to mention seven! My four #1 bestsellers just add insult to the injury for my dear English teachers and college professors. My biggest secret: I hated writing; I still do. But I fell in deep, deep love with authoring. I constantly get the same question: how can you write a whole book? Well, I can’t, but I can author the living daylights out of one.

That might be because I found my own way to the flow and structure and rhythm of a publishable book. I don’t know for sure, but it’s a good bet that my approach is like nothing taught to lit majors or pontificated in creative writing classes, but a closer to the ground approach on building an immersive, engaging, and enlightening manuscript.

I was on the path of juvenile delinquency in the Bronx. School was a struggle and but for the good hearts and dedication of a few teachers who didn’t write me off, I avoided a life of dubious income streams. I was forced to work at the age of 14 due to my truck-driving father’s heart attack and 12 subsequent years of hospitals and doctors. Expensive hospitals and doctors. I did a few weeks as a delivery boy for Fuller Brush for 10 cents a ticket plus tips, as much as a quarter! Then I built a computer in an attaché case for a science fair and rolled that into a job at NBC News. At 16, I was a valued non-employee, since I was underage and allowed to work there under the rules of nepotism. Although I broke those rules every day because my dad wasn’t a VP of NBC or RCA. Under people like Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, I learned the news. Who, What, Why, When, and How - Those are the essential beats of news. Later, I would discover the essential beats of commercial fiction. I became a film director and honed a sharp edge between observation of life and then creating life before the camera. Two of my number 1 bestsellers were adopted from my screenplays.

My literary career has two parts. Helping myself and later, helping others. After a few #1 bestsellers, people started asking me questions about writing. So, the other half of my purpose was revealed to me. This course, From Writer to Author, is the result of the discoveries from my book coaching career. Analyzing the craft of scores of wanna-be authors, I started to see patterns and common blind spots and missteps many otherwise good writers encounter on their way to creating a viable, publishable, manuscript.

My goal is to take writers, like you, to the next level on their way to being published. For some, the result will be a publishable manuscript others might break through to some aspect of authoring that was once foggy or vague. At a minimum, if a student gets only one idea crystallized so that it finds a home in their psyche and craft, then my efforts will have been a success.

- Tom Avitabile