Michael La Ronn Blows Us All Away

The Part-Time Author Gets Full-Time Results That Would Make Hamilton Jealous

Michael La Ronn’s writing schedule looks like something inspired by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton. He’s published over one hundred books, posted 445 advice videos on YouTube, and filmed 161 episodes of his podcast, The Writer’s Journey. With a catalog like that, as well as a day job in the insurance industry, you might think he lives up to the description Miranda’s chorus gives its titular character; truly, “the man is nonstop.” 

But although his tutorials include titles like Be a Writing Machine, Power Hour, and Beast Mode, La Ronn takes mental health seriously, and over the years, he has found ways to balance his writing career with family and rest.

Stay Alive

La Ronn writes Science Fiction and Fantasy novels about underdogs, and their stories are hopelessly optimistic. “I love to tell stories about characters whose odds are stacked against them,” he says. As an author taking law school courses, maintaining a full-time job, raising a young family, and holding a position as an outreach manager with ALLi, La Ronn might seem like a candidate for one of those stories himself. But he carries his characters’ optimism through everything he does, as he has from the very beginning. 

He describes himself as always having been a writer, but his publishing story begins in 2012, when a near-death experience forced him to reevaluate his priorities. After a month in the hospital, La Ronn emerged with a new ambition: to become an author. 

“I thought my first book was going to allow me to quit my job and retire to the beach and just chill for the rest of my life, and that is not at all what happened,” he says, smiling at his early naivety. He describes his experience with writing and publishing his first book as falling on his face, but he doesn’t regret that failure. “I think it's a good thing, because it's humbling. It's almost like a rite of passage. You have to make all those mistakes to learn how to do it correctly.” 

La Ronn believes that the first book shows everything you would want to know about what kind of writer someone is. “It encompasses all of your hopes and dreams and fears,” he says.

According to La Ronn, the biggest mistake he made early in his career was one most new writers make–forgetting what they love to read. “You know, we are all avid readers before we become writers. But when we become writers, and we publish that first book, we forget everything that we learned as readers,” he says. Moving forward, he found that the key to success would be minimizing “that disconnect between becoming a writer and an avid reader.” 

It didn’t take long for him to realize that the lessons he was learning might be helpful to others. With Author Level Up, which he started in 2015, La Ronn shares his experience in the hopes of giving back to the community and supporting others looking to make writing a career. “I'm not a bestseller yet, but I'm doing some things right and sharing my success as I go,” he says. Author Level Up provides videos, courses, and several writing advice series available in ebook, paperback, and audiobook formats.

Between these nonfiction guides and his novels, La Ronn hit the twenty-books mark in five years and spoke at the 20BooksTo50K® conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2018. His talk, “Part-time Author, Full-time Results,” not only shared relatable stories and actionable writing tips but also showcased the public speaking skills he’d already honed through his podcast and YouTube videos. 

By then, he’d also joined the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) in 2014 and had begun contributing to their podcast in 2017. In 2020, he added the title of outreach manager for ALLi to his list of jobs. “My role at ALLi is really just to help authors know what's going on out there,” he says, “but also to bring in reputable service providers that other authors should know about.” 

Any one of these jobs might keep someone else busy without adding writing and selling one hundred books to the mix. But La Ronn says he is “someone who is always going to write. It’s part of the fabric of who I am.”

The Room Where It Happens

The prolific author hasn’t achieved his extensive backlist in a traditional way. Balancing his writing alongside so many other responsibilities has required a certain level of flexibility from La Ronn. As a result, the author of The Pocket Guide to Pantsing writes novels, short stories, and self-help books for writers on the go. Fitting in five minutes here and twenty minutes there, he has “found that all of those little times add up over the course of the day,” he says.

Family, especially, has always been at the top of his priority list. During that talk in Las Vegas, he shared that one of his “whys” for writing was that it was “a way of counteracting that negative energy” from having been abandoned by his father when his parents divorced. As a result, La Ronn made sure to build his writing career around his family rather than trying to fit family time around another job.

The “room where it happens” has become whatever room La Ronn happens to be in when he gets a moment to work. In 2018, he was writing as much as 60 percent of his manuscripts on his phone, using Scrivener’s iOS app without a keyboard. La Ronn writes while standing in line at Costco, while sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, or while walking the dog. That last example has been improved by adding a new skill to his repertoire: dictation. According to an interview he did with Hank Garner for Dabble in May 2024, La Ronn spent two weeks practicing by dictating the same two chapters over and over until he could do it with 98 percent accuracy. Switching to dictation has benefited La Ronn’s writing schedule, his physical and mental health—and his dog, he jokes, as his walks have gotten longer.

What Comes Next?

In the past few years, La Ronn’s day-to-day has become a little less busy but no less full. He graduated from law school in 2021. His daughter has grown a little more independent. His day job has shifted to a different company and a position that includes more flexibility. But he’s still not a full-time writer, even though his book business has become self-sustaining. “Writing full time is definitely an ambition, and I already make enough to do that. However, I’ll make that leap when the timing and personal circumstances are right,” he says.

In the meantime, La Ronn follows a schedule that varies around the needs of his family and his day job. He continues to write during downtimes, in the spaces between work and activities. He says he “had to learn to pivot and change my writing, to mold whatever my schedule is at the time. It's different in the winter than it is in the summer.” 

He plans out when he will write day by day, with the goal of writing more days than he doesn’t. Some days, no words get written, but others, he goes into “beast mode” and writes 4,000 words in a day. Either way, he doesn’t stress about it. “I just think life is too short to stress out about writing. Writing is supposed to be the thing that you come to to relax,” he says.

La Ronn’s flexible scheduling extends into his writing style. Unlike Hamiton, La Ronn has never written “like he’s running out of time.” Instead, he says writing each book “takes as long as it takes.” When writing fiction, he follows the vibes both in terms of what genre he will write—Sci-Fi, Fantasy, or nonfiction—and the stories he tells. “The only thing I know when I start a story, for the most part, is a hero in a setting with a problem,” he says. “Beyond that, anything can happen.”

Satisfied

Despite his prolific career, La Ronn has found a balance that includes time to relax and enjoy his life outside of writing. And that has led him to enjoy writing even more. “I used to be so busy that I just was busy all the time. And I really didn't have anything outside of writing and work. And now, I'm just kind of chilling. Now I'm kind of enjoying where I'm at,” he says. 

La Ronn doesn’t spend hours locked down in front of a computer or shuffle through a tabbed and highlighted series of outlines. He has no set goal for how many books he’d like to publish nor a competitive publishing schedule filled with anticipated preorders. “I define success as being able to write the books I want to, achieving enough income to sustain the business, and having a great network of author friends to help me keep my sanity. I met those goals a long time ago, so now my focus is on sustaining it and never losing sight of how fortunate I am to be here,” he says.

Jenn Lessmann

Jenn Lessmann is the author of Unmagical: a Witchy Mystery and three stories on Kindle Vella. A former barista, stage manager, and high school English teacher with advanced degrees from impressive colleges, she continues to drink excessive amounts of caffeine, stay up later than is absolutely necessary, and read three or four books at a time. Jenn is currently studying witchcraft and the craft of writing, and giggling internally whenever they intersect. She writes snarky paranormal fantasy for new adults whenever her dog will allow it.