The Beginning

When is the beginning? Was it back in June 2005 when I first told my wife that I wanted to quit my job and set up a home based internet business? Or was it back in 1996, when I stayed home with our first born child, supposedly to finish my Master's Degree, but instead wrote fiction like a madman hoping to publish something, anything, that would lead to more publishing, mayby a novel, whatever so I would not have to go back to work. I also messed around with a book indexing correspondence course back then, but was too bored to complete it. Or was it even further back in time...

Ok, I'll start with June 2005. That is when I told my wife that I wanted to start a business. I even had the business picked out. I would sell personalized books over the internet.

Why personalized books? Several reasons really. First, I had been perusing a book on the best home based businesses (don't ask me what it was call - I have regularly checked out one book or another on starting a home based business for the last 10 years or more), when I saw a listing under the publishing section for Hefty Publishing, Create-A-Book Personalized books. I was interested in something in publishing, probably because of my so far failed attempts to get my own fiction published. And even though selling personalized children's books is not really publishing (though my eight year old daughter, who wants to be a writer herself, expects me to publish her first novel, The Magic School), it is at least related to the publishing field. Secondly, the start up costs didn't seem too high (I'll get into expenses in a later post), I could always sink some money in and than get out without losing my shirt if things didn't turn out ok. Thirdly... I don't know, maybe there isn't really a thirdly, and maybe, probably, I didn't really think it through that well.

So then, I had a plan (or well an idea), I had a business that would be easy to get started. What more did I need? A name, of course. And the winner, after very little competition was MadLuck Books.

"Why 'MadLuck' Books?" you say. I can answer that one by quoting directly from the FAQ section of my website- "MadLuck is a play on the first three letters of our two daughters’ names: Maddie and Lucia. But it also refers to the crazy luck you have when you discover a magical world in a great book that you open up for the first time, and the crazy luck which has allowed us to be able to start this business." I know what you are thinking, "How corny can you get?"

The truth is, MadLuck, or MadLuc, or Mad Luck were the names I had given all my imaginary ventures - you know MadLuck Farms, MadLuc Enterprises, Mad Luck Publishing. So now we would have MadLuck Books. And for the internet madluckbooks.com.

So that is where we will end for today. Coming soon - Spending Money, and A Countdown to Quiting the Day Job.