This is part two of an nine part blog chain posted by Mark Terrence Chapman, author the The Imperative Chronicles. The first two books, The Mars Imperative and The Tesserene Imperative, have been published, and Mark is currently hard at work finishing the third and final book.

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MY LONG, STRANGE ROAD TO BECOMING A PUBLISHED NOVELIST (PART II)

By Mark Terrence Chapman

(This entry is a continuation of the Blog Chain begun on author Gabriella Hewitt’s blog. Click here to return to Part I.)

For the first few years I worked for IBM, I spent most of my time learning. By my fourth year, I’d become an expert in some areas, and people came to me for help. Later that year (1983), IBM introduced the IBM PC XT, the first business personal computer with a hard disk drive (a whopping 10 megabytes—woo-hoo!). I volunteered to be the lead guy for the support of that product, and soon came to know quite a bit about it.

By 1984, I had transitioned from supporting the bigger computers I’d started with to PCs-only. This was when writing first re-entered the scene for me. Because so many people came to me for answers, it soon became obvious that answering the questions on a one-to-one basis was inefficient. So I began typing how-to tips and Q&As into a support database set up for that purpose. This proved popular, so I kept doing it. After a couple of years, I’d created more than 400 such support documents on a variety of topics.

Then in 1987, IBM introduced the OS/2 operating system. (Anyone remember it?) It was a major improvement in operating systems at the time (Windows was still an add-on to DOS at the time, and very inefficient and slow). Thus began the next phase in my writing career.

Two of us in the IBM HelpCenter were given the assignment of supporting OS/2. We quickly became experts on the subject. The demands on our time were such that if we didn’t have a database of answers to refer others to, we’d never have time to research new problems. So I started writing OS/2-related database items like mad. These were useful, but only the support people in the HelpCenter had access to the database. We needed a way to reach a broader audience so that people could answer their own questions without having to call the HelpCenter.

In 1989, IBM released the second version of OS/2. To me, the best new feature was something called IPF (Information Presentation Facility). Basically it was a precursor to Adobe Acrobat. It gave me a way to create online books that people could download and use locally, offline. Before long, I had converted hundreds of Q&As and tips into a series of online books. Both customers and IBMers gobbled them up and demanded more.

So I complied. I kept writing and expanding and publishing those online books (eventually totaling 12 volumes). In 1990, curious to find out how many people were using them, I took to including a survey inside each book, asking such questions as how many tech support calls a week they avoided having to make because of the books, whether they bought any IBM products they wouldn’t have otherwise, and so on. The results were staggering. According to the surveys returned (which were from a small percentage of the users), more than 2,000 phone calls a week were prevented, and more than $3M a year in additional sales revenues were generated by IBM as a result.

What does any of this have to do with my becoming a novelist? Keep reading. I’ll get there, I promise.

I submitted the survey results to my manager, who bumped it up to higher management. Later, I was told that I might have an award coming for my work. It took a year for the right people to agree and settle on an amount, but in September 1991, I received a plaque and a check for six-figures. (Okay, after Uncle Sam was done with it, I got to keep something in the upper five-figures.)

As you can imagine, this sort of recognition piqued my interest. I wondered if there was any other way I could leverage all that work I’d done. But I wasn’t sure how to go about it, or if IBM would let me.

My long journey to becoming a novelist takes a detour through nonfiction first.

Click here to read the next segment of the story, on author Joyce A. Anthony’s blog, and find out what happens next.