About Mike

Hey, Mike McMillan here.

Glad you stopped by. I can’t even imagine anyone wanting information on my life or background, but you clicked so here’s some stuff.

I was a high school chemistry teacher for 14 years. Back 20 years ago I wrote a couple of print-and-ink type books for other chemistry teachers and they sold well. My very first booklet of only about 50 pages is shown below. Despite its small page count this book sold well for me for 15 years at $14.95.

This little guy sold so well, in fact, that within a few months I had written half a dozen other similar books (some 200-300 pages) and was selling these too through a little 4-page catalog I created. I rented a mailing list from MDR of 5,000 chemistry teachers and got things going.

Within a year I was making more selling my books than I was teaching, so I left the classroom. I loved teaching but couldn’t take the bureaucratic stuff I had to deal with every day. The next year I mailed out about 20,000 catalogs to science teachers.

I continued to develop more books and instructional aids until I had about 40 books I had written, several dozen instructional videos, two lines of magnetic manipulative products, and a few software packages. My catalog was now about 80 pages and featured all of my own products as well as chemicals, biological specimen, microscopes, videos, etc. I was printing 40,000 catalogs and sending them out to science teachers in every high school and moddle school in the U.S.

About that time I developed my Student Survival Series of 10 videos and a 300 page workbook which I sold for $1,195 and I couldn’t get them reproduced fast enough to keep them in stock.

I decided to write a book that would show others how to self publishin teir own materials just as I had done and that was the genesis of my Mig Money Writing Little Books program. It started out as a paper and ink type book and then later I turned it into an ebook which I still sell today.

About that time I got an email from a producer at ABC World News in Manhattan asking me if I would like to come to NYC and do a feature interview on the topic of self publishing. Alison Stewart, who is now with MSNBC, did the interview and it ran on a 400+ ABC affiliate stations across the country.

I developed a program showing teachers how to develop their own instructional materials and called it Big Ideas In Little Books. This is probably the most important program I ever put together and I am quite proud of it. Shortly thereafter I used that program to develop an online course for teachers that is currently offered through over 1,400 community education programs, colleges and community colleges across the U.S.