I generally am working in multiple, interrelated areas, which tend to overlap.
Publishing
Writing and publishing books and slowly looking at publishing the works of others.
For now, I have a long-term project plan (I used Michael Gerber’s EMyth System to overhaul my project planning process of my business in 2017—-the whole reevaluation process took 1 year.) which breaks everything down in several business areas as well as production for publishing. So I have about 40+ fiction books in ongoing/publishing process.
The Process is generally a file folder set up that includes Drafts, Covers, Research, etc.. When a Project reaches the stage of having a set computer folder, it’s on the calendar for production—-eventually.
The fiction books have been expansive and then contracted from the first 3 non-fiction books (Good Men for Men, Pleasuring Tops Bottoms and Versatiles and Multiple Orgasm Training for Men)—-then from there—-further breaking down workshops I’d taught in person for years—-there were more specific topics that weren’t worth the production costs of 300+ pages but were still relevant and useful subjects.
From 2013 until 2021 we did the Big Three and then smaller “Special Reports”—-generally being under 200 pages—-but over 150—-because that’s the spine width for placement in stores as a paperback necessary by page count. There were initially 52 of them——focusing on specific things like oral sex, escorts, fetishes', sexual abuse, etc.. While teaching these courses over the years, I had such trouble finding source materials—-so I created them. In both paperback and eBook formats and the selling happened—-quite well. Some better than others.
After the EMyth overhaul, the central question being—-what would you do differently NOW, if you were to begin again?—-I looked at having added even smaller works—-”Briefs” which were generally about 10 pages on very specific topics—-the idea being essentially big, medium, small content. But what began to happen was that only a portion of the content library was selling consistently. Looking at from over 100+ products, what were the top 25, I cut about 80% of the Special Reports and Briefs. Repackaging them into soon to be released Bundles, where I could have 1 consolidated price and not so many materials to make evergreen (updating, editing, updating hyperlinks in eBooks, etc.) and keep financial/royalty track of. BY that I mean books start out on say Amazon, migrate to Barnes and Noble, then Thriftbooks, then eBay, etc. so you find yourself doing more and more searches to isolate where the books are sold or resold and if you’re getting a piece of the sales pie——and why or why not. It is a trip to see your books being sold on eBay—-a compliment at the same time that it’s a profit loss.
All of that explanation boils down to another 5 Bundles—-literally a compressed/combined 40 books worth of materials.
There’s several educational books—-one on the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality and spirituality—-Ashe. It’s got a folder and the huge next step of a proof copy of 400+ pages done in a layout—-some works though need to be finished by themselves. So I take it out every year, cobble at it then move on to other works.
The same has happened with a tetralogy (four textbooks) of some educational textbooks, though I have finally finished the writing, research and layout of the first one, Rites of Passage. It focuses on the classes/programs I’ve designed and taught at NYC schools for years. What took that textbook so long was that in examining and teaching how to design a long-term program for young men of color—-I literally had to teach and then watch the development of those young men.
Then I had to marry together a buttload of research, including statewide data about education to fulfill the explanation of the book itself in how to affect and effect change. Then, as with all projects—-I had all of the right pieces (chapters) but not in the right order.
I’ve found that in working in the design aspect of a book that too goes through a Draft Process of sort of how I flat out initially see the basic information. Then I go and find something similar—-a textbook—-and LOOK at it, really look at it—-how it’s designed, how it looks, how it feels to the eye, what is confusing and not. A fiction book, a non-fiction manual on relationships or sexuality and a text book are all yes, birds, but three different types of birds. I have learned that I have to take time to slowly find or get help in the design of both the internal and the external.
And then to non-deadlined projects, some I put aside until I have a broader attention span or learn how to do something better.
The Kyle Phoenix Show (TV and Videos)
Since 2009 I’ve produced and hosted TKPS on public access cable and then uploaded shows and videos to YouTube, Hi5, Metacafe, Scilipo. The taping and editing of a show takes 10–20 hours depending on the complexity to get a 28 minute product for weekly broadcast. In the 14 years of broad casting—-we’re up to about 650 episodes—-I’ve varied between somewhat newscasting reporting on subjects, short films to aid a subject, and started to delve into interviews. Pointedly, with my own personal exhaustion at seeing Black content creators—-singing, dancing, comedy or extremely upset/polemic about social issues—-I’ve tried to focus on race, sexuality, culture, identity, finances and education in a serious way, a useful to solutions way.
COVID shutting down the world meant that the TV studio where I would filming interviews was shut down and then a lot of my footage damaged. I have had to essentially set up a mini tv studio in my home, buying all of the equipment as best as possible over the past few years. This meant all of the future scheduled interviews that I was transitioning the show format to have been postponed—-I literally had 200+folk scheduled because the broadcasting plan was to shift from Thursdays at 1130pm, once a week, to every evening—-5 times a week—-so that each interview subject would span a week to in-depthly discuss their topic. But once you commit to schedule like that, you have to fulfill it.
While I have a good sized content library now I would need to be ready to ramp up and broadcast 250 episodes a year—-I currently am contracted for 52. Luckily COVID happened before I was committed to a new schedule and had changed everything. But that means that I still need ramp up time, filming time to secure the guests and I do look to the topics being relevant and evergreen on some level.
I had to look at instead producing multi episodes within each 13 week season following a theme—-Monogamy, STIs, Finance, Mental health, Drugs & Alcohol, etc. to fill out a time I had intended to produce differently.
All of this happens concurrently with the publishing of books, the editing and republishing of new editions, etc..
Educational Work
In my professional and educational work, I’ve been lucky and worked to design what I do and learn to be tied to or supported by the research of what I do for the TV show or the books. Rites of Passage fell in line to designing a parochial school in New Jersey and several other educational programs. I read a lot, about 5 books a week so my focus tends to be on that which I’m interested in or about to produce.
The school design was a challenge that came out of the blue in about 2017–2018 but again COVID affected it’s initial timeline. However I was mainly responsible for the design of the curriculum from elementary school through high school to graduation. Then in there, what I have consulted in doing throughout my sojourn in the NYDOE school system and corporate America is training people to be better teachers/trainers/supervisors so that became a component. Creating a unique curriculum and then creating a training component to train teachers to teach the unique curriculum and then training everyone.
I accepted the project because it was the next stage—-a large educational platform/school from the programs I’d created as a Youth Coordinator then a Program Coordinator for multiple programs with social, personal and vocational outcomes/expectations.
An envisioned final project is a full Omni Institute for adults which would incorporate all that I know about accelerating education n adults in an intensive program that would last for 2 years. Again my publishing work, including the educational work is the groundwork for the programmatic creations.
Timeframes
All of the above are on a release schedule, a dated plan for the next few years, with 2025 being the next company review and another 6 to 10 years being the production contract for TKPS, if I renew.
YouTube and other platform videos have been designed to act as supports to TKPS but at some point I’ll have to give much more development attention to it. Which leads to the fact that I have to look at both audiobooks for the physical books and therefore podcasts for the TV show. Probably within the next year or two those will start coming out.
Writing
Including this blog/article post, I generally post to 3 to 5 platforms about writing, including my own blog The Kyle Phoenix Blog. Right now there are about 3500+ posts/articles between them
In calculating myself, I write about 10 million words a year over the above professional spans, books, scripts, proposals, outlines, curriculums but writing is one of my Life’s Purposes. People think 10+ million words a year is a lot but I point out to them that writing is my Life Purpose, one of them. Mariah Carey probably sings a lot in general through the year because that’s one of the things she is incarnated to do. When you snag onto your one or multiple things, over time, and I’ve been writing for about 30+ years, you get exponentially not just better, but produce more.
I write here as exercise. You are literally watching me/reading me working out in my Writing Gym—-as I was doing something else (studying Google classes for—-a lot—-project management, cloud security, cybersecurity, etc.) But the WIFI was buffering slowly so I took a break and was looking for something to write fast in the meantime. I have about 670+ blogs/articles in the draft stage and surf through those either tightening something up or finishing stuff and publishing it online, which is why I can seemingly release a dozen pieces at a time—-there are way more than a dozen raring to go.
Next I’ll go back to Good Men for Men, the 4th Edition edits due. What I can tell you about writing is that I generally think some material out/through and handwrite other stuff. So the edits and additions to the 4th edition, I have mentally outlined—-I’ll go into the file for several days this weekend—-about 30 or so hours over 3 days and I’ll do all of the things I’ve been thinking about. Then I’ll save it as Draft # whatever it will be, and either go to another project—-I try to stop when I’ve finished a “thought” or I might luck out and find that what I’m doing “completes” it
If it completes it then it just goes into final turnaround edits for publication.
I have two novels that I’m going through their new copies and so far….only a couple of minor typos—-both books are over 600–700 pages so getting it that clean is a Godsend. It means I can fix the typos without any major overhaul——but just to be on top of it, I’ll go through it again to capture what I think will be about 20 minor errors that perhaps only I might see in the books themselves. One of them has a slight layout error that I saw while working on the file before I sent it off but I thought it was a glitch on a dying laptop.
Real Estate and Investing
I think of money as a level of circulation so that I look at real estate projects and investment as the areas where I move profits into. The challenge is to create sustainable profits in the other sectors that I’m working on which means that I will be able to use those monies to pool into other investments. The financial complexity of ownership (I own all of my content/work purposefully) and the multiple ways I have to keep track of production, finances, taxes, expenditures, short and long term plans, is a lot. I’ve been able to do it better because I’ve spent so long in corporate America (finance, securities litigation, management) so I can transfer a lot of those skills and education to managing royalties, licensing, and valuation.
Those last three are the primaries which I focus my attention to my work through—-how much will it cost to produce a book, a TV show (by episode/per season), a video (by minute length), blogs/articles, podcasts, audiobooks, etc.. It includes one of the reasons why I both evergreen my products and look at the multiple iterations that a singular product can exist/be sold as to expand the sales base.
I also am looking at I need a broad portfolio within everything—-which is why I experimented with doing so many Special Reports and Briefs in Publishing—-then review 1,3,5,7 years and pivot/delete the Reports that didn’t meet a certain threshold. While it may not have cost me a lot, I felt in some ways it wasn’t serving the overall company portfolio to have so many mini-projects/books.
My Time
People often ask how I do so much and one of the big time sucks I avoid is TV itself. I don’t watch TV. I have Netflix and Amazon Prime for work and eventually I think a bunch of my shows will upload to Prime, further expanding my production relationship-contract with Amazon—-we’ve been working as partners for close to 20 years now (I also buy their stock) but I minimize my “entertainment” time on those platforms.
Sometimes I’ll be writing or typing or designing or editing while watching a film or series on another monitor but what I like about that is I can turn it off, pause it, come back to it. It can take me as a long as a week to watch a 90 minute movie because I’m only watching 15 minutes or so before sleep. And then some movies I can see are worthy of my undivided attention so I’ll save them until I do just that.
Yesterday I woke up early, made some soup and actually watching A Wedding Guest from beginning to end in one sitting. I really enjoyed the economy of the story. I do often think I should review more movies, series and books so I’ve started taping those with my new cameras for TKPS or YouTube.
I try to balance things out by going out with friends—-dinner, exercise, swimming, meditating, and taking clear and clean days away from the overall itself. I’m also looking starting to play the guitar with lessons. I have a burgeoning interest in music composition. Also some of the above books have the possibility of being converted further into films and short-series. 2025 gives me a jump point to consider the next 10+ years of The Omni Group.
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