In my previous post, I talked about pitfalls that await someone who leaves a crummy job for an ill-fated business venture.

For me, the crummy job was in the publications and publicity office of a fundraising organization. This organization lavished all sorts of loving kindness on its donors, but couldn’t extend the same courtesy to its staff. The ill-fated business was a bicycle book publishing venture.

During the summer before I left my job, I attended the Stanford Professional Publishing Course (SPPC), which was held on the campus of Stanford University. This was considered to be one of the most prestigious courses in the publishing industry, and I was thrilled when I got the acceptance letter.

The course drew quite a few people from the big publishing houses and media conglomerates, and those people had expense accounts to match. Me? I got to Stanford through a combination of “family and friends” funding and “do what you gotta do” things like selling a 12-string guitar that had been sitting in the corner for a while.

The contrast between my “Stanford on a Shoestring” approach and the ample funds of my SPPC classmates became painfully obvious when a group of us went to dinner at a high-priced restaurant in San Francisco. While others feasted on sumptuous entrees, I could only afford to order a salad.

That evening notwithstanding, the course did offer all three of the benefits that Thursday Bram discussed in her recent post, “What is That Next Conference Going to Do For Your Freelancing?”

1. The Interaction

We quickly developed the reputation of being a very talkative group. And argumentative, as more than a few of the instructors found out. Some of the SPPC instructors were more than a little surprised to be challenged with the ferocity that some of my classmates displayed.

2. The Education

One of SPPC 1994’s recurring themes was that the future of publishing would be digital. More than a few classmates seemed threatened by this news. I remember seeing “Print Is Not Dead!” scrawled on a whiteboard in our dorm.

3. The Credentials

Although I wasn’t heading back to a high-powered publishing job that would get a boost from my having spent two weeks at Stanford, I did learn something about those with prestigious credentials: They live in a different world than we do.

During a break between classes, I sat at a discussion table that was chaired by a New York book editor who was the wife of a bestselling author. The editor was lamenting the state of one of her current book projects, especially her company’s inability to offer the author more than a $55,000 advance. A fellow classmate who was a widely published freelance writer later told me that she’d never gotten anywhere that amount of money for anything she’d ever written. Me? I’d never seen that kind of money for anything I’d done, writing or otherwise.

After the course ended, I went back to Tucson, worked a couple more months in my crummy job, and then went fulltime into that book publishing venture.

Within a few months of leaving my job, it became painfully obvious that, despite my two weeks at Stanford, I didn’t know much about the realities of the publishing business. I sold a good chunk of my books to wholesalers who were very quick to order and very slow to pay. One of them was notorious for returning books in unsellable condition instead of paying for them.

By the spring of 1995, I was ready to do something else. Tried freelance writing. Got nowhere. Started job-hunting. Had zero luck in getting an interview until the summer of 1996.

While mired in my struggles, I wrote a desperation-laden e-mail to another SPPC 1994 alum. In response, he suggested that I get into the business of helping people create a presence on the Internet.

Wish I could remember this guy’s name – he was quite the character. His SPPC course bio said that he’d been a very successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist. We all knew him as the guy who brought a stuffed bunny rabbit to class.

Since nothing else was working out, I decided to give Mr. Bunny Rabbit’s suggestion a try. Turns out that it yielded big results.

Like most mid-1990s Web people, I had figure out how to develop the skills needed to help clients create an online presence. Formal classroom training was hard to find, especially here in Tucson, Arizona. And I probably wouldn’t have been able to afford it. So, using the employee discount at the bookstore where I’d found temporary work, I bought a book on writing HTML.

I’ll never forget the day where I announced to my landlady, who’d been programming computers since the punch card days of the 1970s, that I was programming too! She asked what language I was using. HTML was my reply. She gently pointed out that HTML was a page description language, not a programming language.

Oh, well.

I pressed on with my “learn HTML at home from a book” course. Then I found my first client, my father. Launched his consulting website in 1996, and Dad referred me to my second client, his patent attorney. That attorney is still a client.

These days, most of my work involves website development for universities. I’ve been completely job-free since my bike shop days ended in December 2000, but I’m humbled by the fact that many others haven’t fared as well as I have. Recall the story of my former boss from my previous post. Here comes another story like that one.

Within the academic environment, and within publishing overall, communications are moving away from print and toward the Internet. Just as the Stanford course predicted. And I’m benefiting from this trend. I’m grateful for having gotten that Stanford heads-up back in 1994. I’m also grateful for my background in print publishing. After all, a website is yet another type of publication.

Now, here’s the not-so-happy side of this trend: As we all know, the print publishing industry has been in heavy downsizing mode. I suspect that more than a few of my SPPC classmates have been casualties. So has SPPC itself. I just read that the course is being discontinued.