Latest / The WritersWeekly Podcast / Episode 55 - BESTSELLERS That were Self Published (That YOU will Recognize)

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Episode 55 - BESTSELLERS That were Self Published (That YOU will Recognize) · The WritersWeekly Podcast

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Writers Weekly Podcast, a forum geared toward the writing enthusiast and those who want to make money from their writing.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Brian, MG Editor, and I'll be your host.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: You can also click over to Writers.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: There you will find not only thousands of articles about professional writing, but you can also find current paying markets and job listings to help you boost your writing career and even your bottom line.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: But for now, let's get on to this episode of the Writers Weekly Podcast.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Greetings and welcome once again to the Writers Weekly Podcast on National Public Radio.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: We're delighted to have with us once again the president and CEO of BookLocker.com, Mrs.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Angela Hoy, to discuss with us all things literature and authorship.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_03: You're gonna put our listeners to sleep.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: You don't like that?
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_03: Who are you?
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_03: What did you do with my husband?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: All right, hey everybody.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's us again.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome again to the Writers Weekly Podcast.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: I thought I'd try a little alternate intro, but that just ain't us.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: With me as usual, Angela Hoy, president CEO of Booklocker.com.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: How you doing?
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Doing good.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um we're still alive.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: We are still alive.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, uh, we had a great labor day.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: We did.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: We had an interesting little birthday trip.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: You want to tell folks about it?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_03: We uh well Why did we go on this trip?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_03: As we've shared before, we have Bigfoot on our property.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_03: And uh our son Max turned 25 yesterday.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_03: Can't believe it.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_03: And he wanted to go to the Bigfoot Museum for his birthday.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_03: So last weekend we drove the two hours to Blue Ridge, Georgia.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_03: Beautiful country, absolutely gorgeous.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_03: And what Max didn't know was that our daughter, son-in-law, and four babies were coming with them.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_03: So they walked into the museum, and I thought Max was gonna faint.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: What he also didn't know is we were all sharing the same Airbnb together.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_03: So we get there and downstairs at the Airbnb.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_03: I'll put a link to this one on this place was cool.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_03: Under this episode at ridersweekly.com slash podcast, episode 55.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_03: The downstairs had a pool table, video games, all kinds of toys, puzzles, and a theater.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: A room with four bunk beds.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh theater with big couches.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: Could fit easily six, eight people.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'd say.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Huge TV.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: Beautiful, I wouldn't call it a cabin, but just beautiful house, but right on the right on the on a hillside.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: But the driveway was I can't imagine driving 45 degrees.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_03: Snow or ice, I know.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you have ice, that it that's it.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: You ain't getting in your driveway.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: You're parking on the street.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: And you you gotta climb uh f 70 feet uh straight up practically.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: I it was yeah, but a beautiful house.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and if you're ever in the North Georgia area, uh absolutely go to Blue Ridge and check out um Expedition Bigfoot, yeah, otherwise known as the Bigfoot Museum.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they don't they don't try to convince you of one thing or another.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, it's all about all of the attempts to go out and locate or you know, prove or disprove Bigfoot, the scientific methods and all that stuff.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's filled with all kinds of footcasts, um stories, video uh videos, um you know, encounters, stuff like that.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: They have uh they go back into uh Native American culture thousands of years, and and their names for these big hairy people that live in the woods.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um just lots, lots and lots of fun.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was really great.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_03: Expedition Bigfoot, the owner of the museum, was at our house.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_03: He came a couple times two years ago when we first started having activity, and this year the activity started again on July 13th.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: So don't go there on a Memorial Day weekend.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Labor Day.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, Labor Day weekend.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: It was pretty packed.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man, yeah, it was hard to get there.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_03: Kids had a great time.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_03: So we check into the Airbnb, the kids go downstairs, and again, I'll say they're nine, seven, three, and six months.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_03: And the three older kids just started screaming.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_03: They were so happy because there was so much to do down in that basement.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: That really cool basement.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: Once we closed that basement door, we couldn't hear the screaming.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Right, we were upstairs, yeah.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: All the adults, well, minus their parents, stayed upstairs.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_03: And now remember Max didn't know they were coming for the trip.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_03: And when we walked in the door and they all started screaming, you should have seen Max's face.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_03: It was hilarious.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, they they had a hot tub, real nice screened-in porch.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: It just great, great place.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: We'll we'll post a link to that on Airbnb in case you're in the Blue Ridge area.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: You can check that that home out.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_03: Well, we'll post a link to the Airbnb on our website.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_03: And I got bit by a praying mantis.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_03: And you know what?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_03: You could get bit by a praying mantis.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_03: Brian was trying to catch it.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: And this was a huge praying mantis.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he was inside the the screen porch.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: And Angie, of course, like, oh, you gotta save it.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: You gotta I'm like, I that thing is huge.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I go over there.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not afraid of bugs necessarily.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: And as soon as I go to grab it, he digs his little front arms into the into the sc through the screen holes.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and they have little barbs on their arms.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: So now I'm trying to pull him off this screen without tearing his arms off.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: And as soon as I get him, get him off, he starts spinning his head around and going at my fingers.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I'm not having any of this.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: You're on your own, buddy.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I I did it.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_03: I went and got his little hands off and then got bit meant, well, pinched.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, he was pinching me with both of his front pinchers, uh-huh, and he was like hanging off my hand.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_03: He was pinching me so hard, and I got him outside of the screen.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_03: I saved his life, and he rewarded me by giving me this big white pinch mark on my finger.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: See, that's why I don't think it's a big giant praying man.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: He's free.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: So, what do you got for us today?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first, uh I want to remind everybody that we have a special discount for our listeners.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: If you come to booklocker.com, sign up with us.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: You can get$200 off of our top three publishing packages by simply putting in podcast 200 in uh into the discount block on your checkout.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: Discount code box, yeah.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Discount code box, as Angela has corrected me.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I'll keep doing it too.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's a block to me.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, this is not scripted.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: When you go to checkout, when you go to checkout, put in podcast 200, and we're gonna give you$200 off.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: Just for listening.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna enjoy the experience.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: Not nearly as much as the Bigfoot Museum, but you're gonna you're gonna like it.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna dig it.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, today um we're gonna be talking about um something that's kind of near and dear to our heart, and I think you're gonna have fun with it.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: Let's start off with uh Angela.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: You deal with this all the time.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: You get authors that come in and want to know would their books sell better if they went with a traditional author as opposed to to um You mean traditional publisher?
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: Traditional publisher.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm doing it again.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna do I'm I've got to be.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: I got to I'm serious.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um would they would they sell more books if they went with the traditional publisher as opposed to self-publishing?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: And what do you tell them?
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_03: Well, we recently published an article on Writers Weekly about the publish the traditional publishing industry is dying.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_03: It really is.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_03: They cannot compete book sales-wise with the more than three million books that are being self-published in the United States every year that doesn't include other countries.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_03: They just can't compete.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: And they they don't offer new unknown authors, you're not getting a book tour, you're not getting an advance, the royalties rate's gonna suck.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's just there's you can do far better self-publishing than you can traditional getting traditionally published.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_03: And in that article, again, we'll put a link under this episode.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_03: It has some startling statistics.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_03: If you think your book's gonna be in every bookstore, it's not.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's probably not gonna be in any bookstores.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_03: Most traditionally published books now, and then we're not talking like Stephen King and the the big guys uh sell like 15 copies or something.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_03: I I can't remember the exact statistic, but it's it's it's mind-boggling.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_03: So and I started out self-publishing, and I've told this story before, and I'm not gonna tell it all over again.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_03: Landed a contract with St.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_03: Martin's Press, was very disappointed.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_03: Your sales tank.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_03: I had sold thousands of copies through Writers Weekly, and it was just an ebook.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_03: It took them two years to get the book to market, and they made me take it off the market when they gave me my advance, which was nice, but I would have made a lot more money if I just kept doing it myself.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and over the years they only sold eight hundred and forty-five copies.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we decided to do a uh episode today on self-published books that became best sellers.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: And we ain't talking couple thousand copies.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: These are these are bitten, some of these names you're going to recognize.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we've had lots of successful authors at Book Locker, and we'll talk about um a few very successful ones today.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_03: Bill Henderson, bless his heart.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_03: We actually visited him and his wife twice while we were RVing years ago.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_03: He wrote Cancer Free, Your Guide to Gentle Non-Toxic Healing.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_03: And how that book came about was his previous wife had had breast cancer and the chemo killed her, not the cancer.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_03: And after she died, he determined he was going to find better ways to treat cancer that is not chemo and save lives.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_03: And he did.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_03: The front of his book is full of testimonials from people who read that book.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: That book is mostly it's about eating right and and living healthy.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: And and your body cures the cancer, not not radiation, not a bunch of chemicals, but your own body weather.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_03: There's there's yeah, he recommends, you know, there's certain foods, there's different types of things to do for different types of cancer.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um he even goes so far as to talk about uh uh what is it when they drill into your root root of your canals?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, root canals.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the the chemicals in the root canals can actually cause cancer as well.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_03: Better just to have your tooth yanked.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_03: But he he also uh released the fifth edition, and that was um also written with a physician, a doctor.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_03: So that book uh sadly Bill passed away a few years ago.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um he was traveling, had an accident or something, and had to go to the hospital and they gave him the wrong blood type.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's not good.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_03: Uh his wife took over the business, and that book has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties over the years.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_03: And it still sells today.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_03: And if his book was traditionally published, the marketing well, they wouldn't have done any marketing for him anyway.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_03: So and he was earning far higher royalty royalty percentages doing it himself than if he'd gotten it traditionally published.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: And he was he was doing the talk circuit and putting on seminars and stuff like that.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: So there's your marketing right there.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, so yeah, he didn't have to pay somebody to put a bunch of ads up and and get get his book on the uh um Times Square Billboard or anything like that.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um he did it himself.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_03: And again, he helps he's helped thousands of people over the years.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_03: And Gary Sturgis is our current best-selling author.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_03: Uh he is the author of Surviving Grief 365 Days a Year, which is an international bestseller.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_03: That book sells far better in the UK than it does in the U.S., and we've talked about this before because in the US people talk about grief, and we think in the UK they don't, so they need books to help them get through it.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_03: He's the author of eight other books as well, but his signature book, Surviving Grief 365 Days a Year, earns Gary several thousand dollars per month in royalties.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_03: He shared his secrets with other authors on our podcast.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_03: What was it, episode 45?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_03: How to earn thousands per month in book royalties.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_03: We'll put a link to that under this episode as well.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_03: Writersweekly.com slash podcast episode 55.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_03: Uh that's part one of two.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_03: So he spent two episodes providing lots of hints and tips, including how to grow your social media following organically.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you don't pay somebody to get followers because they're not real.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_03: How to get um past readers to buy your new books, how to get your readers to leave reviews, and so much more.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_03: He gives so much advice.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's it's a great two-part episode.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: And what a lifestyle he gets to live.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he's making money by doing blog posts, posting on social media, and then he goes around the country.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, well, I don't know about the country.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: I know he's up in the northeast and he goes around the northeast, but he goes to hospice care and uh shares these things with families of people who are dying and have died.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he he he does seminars and stuff like that, you know, and he gets to meet people that he's really helping.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, who really appreciate his book and what a great experience that's gotta be.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: He's a really great coach.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_03: He really, really cares about his readers.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_03: He recently had a book signing at a hospice, and the hospice pre-ordered copies for all of their residents for his he also he's also a grief coach.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: And he's a grief coach, that's right.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: So he's helping people who have had a great loss in their lives deal with it.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_03: Sgrief.com.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_03: Surviving Grief.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_03: SGrief.com is his website.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: What else you got?
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, and he also has uh three quarters of a million, I think, followers on social media now.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he's very popular.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_03: All of them put together.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he's he's and he's all all because he well he he he had a blog for a while, but then he wrote a book about losing his own spouse, and now he's he's just skyrocketed.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_03: But surviving grief 365 days a year, that is by far his bestseller.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_03: And he really cares about people.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_03: He interacts with them online all day.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_03: And people see him, they know he's genuine.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_03: And that's why they keep following him, communicating with him, asking him for help, and buying his books.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_03: Uh okay, so there's another author.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_03: We're not permitted to name.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_03: Some authors won't let us give out their sales numbers for obvious reasons.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_03: Either privacy or, you know, IRS, who knows?
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_03: But uh this author has earned almost at the I looked it up today, the updates almost$77,000.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_03: And then we have an author who's written three volumes of his cop memoir series.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_03: He's doing very well.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_03: His his third one was just released and it's selling like hot kids.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: He was a he was a homicide detective, and man, the stories that he tells.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: Oh.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_03: I edited his last book, and it was it was wow, I was riveting.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: It gives you a real, real close up, dirty look at what it's like to have to deal with that, you know, to work that stuff.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_03: If y'all want to know who I'm talking about, go to writersweekly.com, click on the contact us button, and I'll tell you which book it is.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: But um And don't forget that$200 discount code.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_03: Right, if you're gonna get your book published with us, yep.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_03: Podcast 200 discount code.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I was editing his book and I was so enamored with the stories that I'd read through two pages and forget I was supposed to be editing and I'd have to go back.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_03: That's how good his stories are.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_03: He's a really good writer, yeah.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_03: But we have lots of similar stories from booklocker authors, but we're gonna talk about some other authors today because we can't just talk about ourselves.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Angie, why is it important to keep your publisher appraised of your current contact information?
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_03: We have an author who is currently owed$4,500.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_03: PayPal account no longer works.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_03: Email address no longer works.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_03: I went online.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, every month I get the royalty report and I can't pay him, I can't pay him.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_03: I tried to contact him several times through his author account because the email isn't working.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_03: He never checks his author account.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_03: He never emails me.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_03: So I put on my detective hat.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_03: I found his website.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_03: He's using Gmail now instead of another service, which I can't remember what he was using before.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_03: I think it was AOL.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_03: Contacted him through his website, Crickets.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and then I found him on social media.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: He hasn't posted since June.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_03: He was posting regularly until June.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_03: So my next step is contacting his on our con it's it's catching.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_03: The tongue twisting, it's catching.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_03: Um on the book locker contract, we have a beneficiary clause where if you die, you tell us who gets the rights to your book.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_03: And now, of course, the court papers could say something different, but we will only talk to the person if if if you disappear, we'll only talk to that person about your book.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_03: I had a woman con this happens all the time.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_03: Contact me.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_03: My dad died in June or whenever.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: And um I'm the estate person uh executor.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_03: We're not lawyers.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I need access to his author account and royalties.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_03: And I looked at the contract.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_03: Well, his wife was listed.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_03: And I said, Can you please have so-and-so contact me?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_03: And she said, Well, she died in 2024.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_03: She said, Can I send you copies of the estate paperwork and the death certificates?
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_03: And I said, Yes, we'll work with you.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we'll that will that'll work.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_03: So but we've had people contact us saying, Oh, my dad died, my mom died, whatever.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_03: I need to take over their account and get their royalties.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: And the best one was the guy who I copied the actual author's email when I responded to his son, and the author wrote me back and said, I'm still alive.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_03: And that's why publishers have to be so careful when they're working with authors, because this stuff happens.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_03: Guy wrote to me yesterday.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_03: He said, Change my email address to this, and I I have a form response.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_03: You contacted us from the wrong email address, and I give them steps.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_03: If you can't you can still log into your booklocker account, you just type in your old email address with your password.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_03: Some people forgot the password.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_03: They have to send me a notarized letter in the mail to prove who they are.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_03: Because can you imagine if we didn't have those safety measures in place?
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_03: Oh man, all kinds of people would be stealing from authors.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're an author, it's real important to keep your publisher updated with your personal information and make sure you have a beneficiary because someday, I hate to tell you, you're gonna die.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: And um if you just want your book floating around in limbo, then don't sign up at beneficiary.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: But if you want somebody to take over and benefit from those sales, you better you better uh make sure that your wishes are known.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: We had an 89-year-old author contact us last week and he said, I just can't really do computers anymore.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_03: I want to sign over ownership of my book to a friend of mine.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_03: And he hooked us up together, and he had to go get a notarized letter because what if the family comes back later and says, Oh no, he should have given it to us, yeah.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_03: So he um he sent me, he got the notarized letter, he emailed me a copy, he's mailing me a copy, and I've already turned over his account to the other guy.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_03: So bless you.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: Excuse me.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's all pollen.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man, I've been sneezing and snotting and coughing all over the place.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's bad.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you're ready to dig into some of these big names here.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_03: Now, you were giving me a a kind of abbreviated version today about this book.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_03: I bought a copy of this book for all of my adult kids one Christmas just a couple years ago.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_03: So go ahead.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, have have y'all heard the of the book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_03: Uh-huh.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_03: I bought five copies.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: The whole country's heard of this book.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it was written by a guy named Richard Kiyosaki.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, it's easy to look at that and think that he was some, you know, money guru who who was an expert in all things finance and wrote this book and became, you know, rich and famous for that.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_03: And it basically teaches people how to make money.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, he tries to teach people how to, you know, make money.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but he was actually a uh he he had he was a marine and got out of the Marine Corps, and then he was struggling financially and and kept kind of seeking out, you know, how to come up in the world.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: He started studying a lot of self-help stuff.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he went to a uh conference in 1981 where he met uh R.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Buckminster Fuller.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's a mouthful.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if y'all don't know who R.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: Buckminster Fuller, where have you been all this time?
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: No clue.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, I I had I had no idea who he was.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I looked him up.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: And he was actually uh an architect.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he's a global thinker, a philosopher, a pre- Now he actually R.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: Buckminster Fuller actually did very well just um understanding how to solve problems.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: He'd see a a a process or a product or something, and he would just kind of start thinking of ways of making that better.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: And he discovered this when he was in the Navy.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: Now he he was uh Uh I I think he was in World War One in the Navy.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: And he actually developed a winch that helped get airplanes uh out of the water and onto a ship in order to save the pilot when back then I guess you had to launch rowboats and row out to them, and a lot of pilots were dying before they could get them out of the water.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: So and the Navy actually um uh volunteered him, I guess, for officer candidate school based on figuring out a better way to pull pilots out of it.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, that's who that guy was.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_03: Architect, global thinker, philosopher, and problem solver.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: He was like a super smart guy.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_03: And we are gonna tell you how many copies of Rich Dad, Poor Dad's.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway, um Kius Kiyosaki met this guy and apparently it kind of inspired him.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um and Kiyosaki said that one of the things that Fuller always said is your job is to build an artifact, meaning something that's tangible in the world, right?
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: So Kiyosaki created a board game in the 1990s.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: This is interesting.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and and it was called Cash Flow.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it was supposed to be an educational board game to help people learn about finances.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Now, mind you, he was still a guy who was just kind of delving into the self-help stuff, and I'm sure he studied finances too, but he still wasn't rich.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, he was gonna teach everyone else how to get there.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the rules of the game and the economic philosophies behind those rules made it far too complex for anyone to play the game.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody could understand it.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: So that caused him to partner with a uh with a CPA, and I forget her name, I'm sorry.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: And he wrote the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, to help people understand this game that he made.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, that's interesting.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: So he wrote the how-to manual after he cre after he invented the game.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_03: Interesting.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the first edition was uh published in 1997 and it was self-published.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it started selling, and a large company that y'all may recognize this name noticed it.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: Amway.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: And if Amway is good at anything, it's getting a lot of money out of the people that sign up to sell Amway.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, they make the Amway itself makes more money off of selling selling how to get rich tapes and books to its members than it does selling products to the general public.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_03: I think I think you're right.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not sure that's it it I've read I've read um uh let's just say it's multi-level marketing.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's multi-level marketing.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_03: I have worked for the aerospace company in Texas.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_03: I worked with a girl and she and her husband sold Amway.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_03: And they invited themselves over one night.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_03: We said okay, and we sat through the 30-minute pitch, and they're like, It's only gonna cost you, you know, this much money to and then you can sell to people.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, I already have a full-time job.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_03: Plus, I'm a writer and have a website.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it was so embarrassing for them.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was really really tacky.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: I did it, I did it when I was 18.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: I lasted all about six months, and then I went in the army.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, you never told me that.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't I didn't get rich.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's a new story.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: Here's an 18-year-old living in a one-room apartment trying to teach people how they're gonna get rich if they sign up with Hamlet.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't, it just it didn't go very far.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: All right, let's get back to this.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and um so uh it actually because Amway picked it up and started selling it to its people, uh, it wound up making the New York Times bestseller list.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_03: Now, I know that sounds really good, but that's not very impressive.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's not, except for the fact once your book hits the New York Times bestseller list, everyone says, ooh, it's on the New York Times bestseller list, and they run more people run out and buy it.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_03: I read a statistic that to get on that list you only need to sell 1,500 copies of your book.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and you've got any in the editorial board chooses who goes, it's not really based on sales.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's not best based on a bestseller, it's based on who they think they want on there.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right, exactly.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um so after it hit the New York Times bestseller list, Warner Books contracted to re-release that book in 2000.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um, before you talk about the next part, how many how many millions of copies sold?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, um it sold over 32 million copies.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's still out there.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: Started out self-published, yeah.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I got uh I got another tidbit of news for you.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: He actually wrote a couple more books with other people, partnered up with them, including from what I read, two books with Donald Trump.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_03: Oh be darned.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: Go figure.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna get it.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_03: Where is he now?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_03: Where is he now?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_03: Where is Kayasaki now?
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: 2025.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um People Magazine.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: Hang on, let me just check my my notes here.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh People Magazine interviewed him or or did a story on him.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_03: A man, are you guys sitting down?
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: And apparently now he is$1.2 billion in debt.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_03: How do you do that?
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_03: How do you spend that much money?
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: Teaching everyone how to get rich and then you go into Well, in the story, he said it was good debt because it was all tied up in real estate.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: To me, uh the way I look at it, if I owe somebody a bunch of people$1.2 billion, that ain't a good thing.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I'm not gonna try to figure out how he makes it a good thing, but but there's uh there's an example of a book that was just written by a guy and he put it out there and it took off.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_03: Sold millions and millions of copies.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: Sold millions of copies and he became very, very rich and very, very in debt.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess he should have written a book on well, not him, but somebody needs to write a book on what you do with all that money once you've made it, you know.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh 50 Shades of Grey by E.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: L.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: James.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: She was a British author.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: And again, how many of y'all think uh think you know her story?
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um it it's it's kind of an interesting story.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um she was originally writing uh a fan fiction story uh based on the Twilight series.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: And if y'all know the Twilight series, I think it's a vampire uh series of books about teenage vampires and stuff, and I did not get into that, so I'm not gonna try to tell you what it's all about, but I did know that it was about vampires.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: And she wrote a fiction series on these websites that that do fan fiction um called Master of the Universe.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now she used the pen name in those websites of Snow Queen's Ice Dragon.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: And she would she would publish this this story.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: She would she would do installments or episode, you know, well you know, uh on a week, I think a weekly basis, something like that on there.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_03: That was actually very popular in the early 2000s.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_03: Authors would throw out a chapter a week.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_03: Douglas Clegg, he's our kid's grand godfather.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_03: He uh he's a famous horror author, and he would post he was posting these e-series.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: She said horror author.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: Horror author.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_03: She said it kind of quick, but he was posting a chapter every week.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_03: He did it before Stephen King tried doing that.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_03: And he and then he would publish the book at the end, and a bunch of people that had been reading it every week would buy the book.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: Cool.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: So there's one way to do it.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: Her stories actually featured two of the main Twilight characters, which now the way I see this, it's that's that's kind of copyright infringement or trademark infringement.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: Character mark.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: But that's what fan um fan fiction is all about.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: Taking something that somebody else already created and making up a bunch of other stories with them.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: And some authors have gotten sued for that.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_03: Some authors, uh, the original author didn't mind because it made their series more popular.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_03: So it it really it's a crapshoot.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_03: If you tried writing fan fiction, I would never do it.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think it's worth it.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: However, she kept receiving negative comments on the websites about the sexual nature of her stories.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: So she was getting a little too risque for people on the fan uh fan fiction website.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_03: She's a spicy writer.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: She she it well, it's yeah.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's an understatement, I guess.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: So she decided to go ahead and and remove the story from the fan fiction websites, and she created her own website and posted the story on her own website, and that way she controlled the comments.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess I I again I didn't go look for her website or anything, but I guess if you went to her website, you knew what you were getting, so you couldn't complain.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, she rewrote the Master of the United Master of the Universe and renamed the characters Christian Gray and Anastasia Steele.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um so she then published that story.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: Her first release was in 2011, and it was as an ebook and print on demand through a company called the Writer's Coffee Shop, and it was an Australian virtual publisher, which is I guess basically what we are.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: They're an online publisher, they're not the big New York traditional publisher.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it was in May of 2011.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_03: There were lots of those by then.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_03: But Book Locker was launched in 1998, and it was one of the very first, if not the first, ebook only bookstore.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: Had you heard of Writer's Coffee Shop before?
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: Nope.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_03: So it was an ebook only eBookstore is what it was called, and we ended up buying it because my book became the number one bestseller on their website.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_03: How to write, publish, and sell ebooks.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_03: The day they put it up, it became their number one bestseller.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_03: It was a very popular website.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, now we publish paperback hardcover and ebooks.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um popularity grew by word of mouth.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, writer's coffee shop had a limited marketing budget.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: So the um the the Fifty Shades of Gray actually became popular by people sharing.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, I read this great book.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: I and don't give it to your mother.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: More and more people um were purchasing it.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: Then in April, uh well um in 2012, Vintage Books picked up the work and re-released it, a revised edition, in April of 2012.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: And she wrote a total of three books called Fifty Shades of Grey.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: That was her first, that was her, I guess her flagship book.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: Right, yeah.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: Fifty Shades of Darker and Fifty Shades Darker.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: Fifty Shades, I'm sorry, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um by October 2017, over 150 million copies have sold.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: That was in 2017.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_03: In only six years, 150 million copies sold.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm sure they're still selling.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I'm sure yeah, I know they are.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, are are you interested in some uh some little uh factoids on this?
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I wonder I wonder how much she made from the movie.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_03: I bet she made a lot of money from the movie they made the first book.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um she probably did, yeah.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: It also became a movie, which some of y'all may know, some may not.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_03: The original book, I read it.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_03: The writing style, the writing was very poor.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_03: It still sold because of the content.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it wasn't quite as good as the articles in Nudie Mag's uh penthouse, but um uh the writing was it was a good story, but the writing style was I I didn't like the writing style at all.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_03: It just wasn't good.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_03: There were a lot of people online that complained about the writing.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of reporters had nicknamed the style of writing mommy porn because so many housewives were picking it up and reading it, you know.
• 34:42
  unknown: Yeah.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um well so actually there were a lot of porn reviews.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people complained.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: They said that um that the the BDSM practices that are in the book actually depict an abusive relationship rather than consensual adult play.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_03: I would absolutely agree with that.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: The the female character, you know, the the male character and female didn't sit down and say, okay, hey, we'd I'd like to try this.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: Would you like to do that?
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: What would what you know what what are your boundaries?
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: I did she he just you know went at it.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, and she gave in, and you know, yeah, yeah.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_03: I would definitely agree with that.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_03: Did not seem consensual at all.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and here's another little interesting fact.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: After the book came out, injuries related to BDSM and adult novelty toy use uh spiked.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: Are you serious?
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_03: I did not see that in the news.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: In the in the year after the novel's publishing in 2012, injuries requiring emergency room visits increased by over 50% from 2010, which is the year before the book was published.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess it got a lot of people interested in trying some new stuff, but they didn't stop to study up on how you do it safely.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: Right, yeah.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: And emergency room visits skyrocketed.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: Man.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: So okay.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_03: I want to point out I did not read her second and third book.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: Moving on.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, good for her.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: Good for her.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I just couldn't put myself through that again.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, moving on.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the next book we're going to talk about, I had not um I had not heard of this book.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um some of y'all may have, Angela has heard of it, called The Celestine Prophecy.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that was written by a guy named James Redfield.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now, um Redfield grew up in rural Alabama, and as a young, as a kid, he had an obsession with human spirituality.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: He he wanted to figure everything out, right?
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: And he he grew up in the Methodist church and he was really frustrated because the the Methodist church just couldn't provide all the answers that he had uh or um uh the answers to all the questions that he had on spirituality.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I can I can understand that because the church's answer is Jesus.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: You you you you need to believe in Jesus.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, and nothing wrong with that.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_03: The answer's in the Bible.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: I believe it, you know, they're in the Bible.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: But he wanted more than that, and they they weren't giving it to him.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: So he st he studied a lot of Eastern philosophies, including Taoism and Zen.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um then he went on to college and Auburn University.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: He received a master's degree in counseling, and he spent 15 years as a therapist for abused teens.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: Boy, that's that's gotta be a rough job.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_03: My brother uh worked in child protective services right after he graduated from college.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_03: Didn't last long.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_03: That is a rough job.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_03: It's gotta be hard.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: To listen to all that.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, your heart's just gotta break.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: You gotta you gotta have a tough uh tough inside for that.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he was he was also drawn, he was uh drawn into the human potential movement, and I didn't study up on what the human potential movement is, so it's okay.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's what he was into.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: And he turned to it for theories about intuition and psychic phenomena that could help his troubled clients.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um hey, whatever works, you know.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um in nine in 1989, at age 43, he quit his therapist job to go into full-time writing.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_03: You did really good research on this stuff.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: So here's basically the plot of the book.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: The protagonist travels to Peru and he's seeking out a mist mysterious manuscript containing nine insights about life.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now he runs into all kinds of people who are also searching for the book, as well as he runs into people who don't want that book to see the light of day.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, apparently, there's something about some some priest who's got a lot of government people under his thumb, and he's trying to get the thing censored so that nobody will actually get to read it.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, here are some of those insights um that that are in this manuscript that the protagonist is looking for.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: Embrace serendipity, embrace the energy of nature, reconnect and focus on spiritual instead of economic growth.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I don't know about that one.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: I like paying my bills.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I can I think I can grow spiritually and economically at the same time.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think um understand and let go of the past.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a bad one.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, find your purpose and go after your mission.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that's five of them.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there are four others.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh read the book.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_03: At least there's other not a bunch of you know, satanic stuff in there.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: No, it doesn't, I don't think it's satanic.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: Redfield spoke to a publishing consultant um from New York uh when he had the manuscript ready to go.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he he said that it was intuition that told him that it just so happened that this publishing consultant from New York happened to be in his area in Alabama, so he he goes and finds the guy.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: He said it was intuition.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and after talking to the guy, he decided to self-publish.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: And just as he as his book went to print, he met a woman named Sally Merrill, who was really passionate about giving.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: She was all about giving.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_03: Sounds like a nice lady.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: And Sally and James got married, and out of the 300, I'm sorry, out of the first 3,000 copies that were printed, Sally and James drove around and gave away 1,500 copies to small bookshops and individuals in Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: And this is another book that word of mouth got the ball rolling and created a large demand, and in six months he sold 100,000 copies.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: And this is out of the out of the trunk of his car.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: This is he's the one that was having to ship the copies to people and stuff like that, you know?
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um so um Warner Books um found out about this book and bought the rights for$800,000 and republished the book in March of 1994.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_03: I'd like to know the math of how much he was earning net profit when he was doing it himself versus X.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: I gotta be honest with you, eight hundred thousand dollars for how many copies your books are selling seems like a kind of a paltry amount.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I agree.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I I think I think he he he got the cheap end of the stick on the phone.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_03: If he was if he was self-publishing and doing so well, and he again, self-published authors make a lot more money than traditionally published authors.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_03: If he's doing that well, why would he and he's marketing himself anyway?
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_03: Why would he give up the rights?
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_03: Except what they did was they dangled that$800,000 advance.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_03: Here's your money right now.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_03: Right now, take it right now.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to ship anything, we'll take care of the distribution, we'll take care of your marketing.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: You can sit back and relax.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: And um so eight hundred thousand dollars, and that's what he did.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: His book hit the number one New York Times hardcover bestseller, and he spent three years there.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: Now, again, as Angela told you, um New York Times bestseller list has nothing to do with how many books you sold, but his book did sell quite well.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so I think it was well deserving of being on number one.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um worldwide, he sold over 23 million copies.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: Again, I mean, do the math.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: Right, yeah.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if he was making 35% commission on that and doing it himself, boy.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: But he probably wasn't making that much on.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_03: He was probably earning royalties of five to eight percent.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: Playing great.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that book has been translated into 34 languages.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: And according to publishing trends, it was the number one American book in the world for both 1995 and 1996, and the number one international bestseller of 1996.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: Not bad.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, not bad at all.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: Angie, you got some uh examples of books for us?
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_03: I got some shorts for you.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_03: They're not short books, I mean short mentions.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_03: Wool by Hugh Howie.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_03: That's a cool name.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_03: That is kind of a good name.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: Hugh Howie.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_03: Hugh Howie, Howie.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: Good to meet you.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Hugh Howie.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: Damn, glad to meet you.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: Put her there.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: Hugh Howie.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_03: Are you done?
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_03: Self published as a short story on Amazon.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_03: For self published.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_03: Published on Amazon and grew it into a multi-million copy sci-fi phenomenon and an Apple TV series.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, good for him.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_03: And The Martian by Andy Weir.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_03: He originally serialized that story on his personal blog.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_03: We just talked about serials online serials.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_03: He published it for 99 cents on Kindle before Crown Publishing in Hollywood came calling.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: Great movie.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic movie.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_03: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure other authors have heard of him.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_03: Whitman paid to print and self-published his groundbreaking poetry collection in 1855.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_03: And he can't became very famous.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: Good for him.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: If you can become a bestseller selling poetry, you're doing something special there.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_03: That's right, yeah.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I tell authors who approach us with pure poetry.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_03: I I tell them, well, first of all, we don't accept anything and everything coming over the e-trance, and we're very particular about what we publish.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_03: I have seen some good publish poor poetry books.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_03: But I do warn those authors it's the lowest selling genre.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_03: It really is.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_03: And some people love poetry, but most people don't.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_03: Uh The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_03: You ever heard of that?
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think I might have tripped over that here and there.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_03: By Beatrix Potter.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's a classic, oldie but a goodie.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_03: After multiple rejections from traditional publishing companies, Potter printed the initial run herself before Frederick Warren and Company picked it up.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_03: Good for her.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_03: Now, we've actually mentioned this book in the podcast we had with Clayton, The Trivia.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_03: The trivia contest.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_03: We'll put a link.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_03: We had a book trivia contest between Brian and Clayton, and they had their buzzers were actually fart sounds on their phones.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_03: It was hilarious.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, we'll put a link to that one under this episode as well.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_03: The joy of cooking.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's the best-selling cookbook of all time.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_03: By Irma S.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_03: Rombauer.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_03: She self-published it in 1931 before it became one of America's best-selling cookbooks.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_03: Millions and millions of cookbooks.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty good.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, here's one everyone's going to recognize.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_03: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_03: He was frustrated with the traditional publishing houses, so he set up his own company.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_03: It was called Charles L.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_03: Webster and Company.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_03: Who's Charles Webster?
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_03: And released that novel in 1980 and I'm sorry, 1884.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, that's still in libraries today.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_03: Kids in school still have to read that book today.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, as long as the book's not trying to ban it.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there's that.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um, of course it's now in the public domain.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_03: What happens to the old these old bestsellers is a bunch of companies who have the capability to publish books.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_03: They'll grab these these public domain manuscripts and then you'll find like, you know, 150 different versions of it on Amazon.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_03: And Amazon actually has cracked down on that that practice.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well good.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Amanda Hawking sold over half a million copies of her ten books before she got a traditional contract.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_03: And she has sold more than one million books and has earned two million in royalties.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_03: Good for her.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's it it's kind of a I guess sort of a pep talk for you for for for you authors that are self-publishing.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, keep at it.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: You never know if your next book might, you know, be the one that sells well in a in a traditional publishing company sees it, and then you get that, but then you got to make that decision.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: Do you really want to give up your rights to that to the to a traditional publisher?
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_03: I always regretted selling to St.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_03: Martin's Press.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_03: And I that was co-authored with MJ Rose.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_03: She has since passed.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_03: Always regretted that decision.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_03: It the initial advance was great.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_03: If I just hung on, I would have made so much more money.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: I can't imagine being being that person that sell sells my rights, and then my book sells, you know, 23 million copies.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, how much money could I have made?
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, if you just kept doing it yourself.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_03: And the reason these self-published authors were successful because they were doing their own marketing and their own.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: Then the traditional publisher came in, hey, we'll give you this much for the rights to publish that book.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: So they they were just basically out scraping for whatever was already popular.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_03: You know, Gary Sturgis has received several authors for traditional contracts and he did the math.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_03: He said, No way.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: Good for him.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he's making far more money self-publishing than he would through a traditional publisher.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_03: But for an example, if you sell a copy of your print book through booklocker.com, you're gonna earn 35% royalties.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_03: Now compare that to five to eight percent with most authors, new authors, it's five percent through traditional publishing, no matter where it sells.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_03: If your book sells through Amazon, we have to give a discount to the distributor and the retailer.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_03: So but you're still getting 15% of the list price, not five percent.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_03: And that's way more than you know, than traditional publishing.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_03: You can sell let me do the math.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_03: A third as many books and make the same amount of money.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_03: If I'm wrong with my math, somebody just post a comment under this episode.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: You can sell a lot less books than you have to with a traditional publisher and still make the same amount of money.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right, exactly.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I think 15 and 5%, that's three one third.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_03: Most writers can't really do math.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_03: It's that left brain, right brain thing.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_03: And I've heard it from from many authors over the years.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_03: I suck at math, but you're a really good writer.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, you're a very you are very creative.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you have a creative mind.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_01: So um yeah, we'll share uh links to more self-publishing success stories under this episode at writersweekly.com slash podcast, episode 55.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: And um, well, that about wraps it up uh for this episode.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: I guess I should have come up with a few more uh a few more examples.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, it's fine.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um next week, Clayton Jones is joining us again.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, always a hoot.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we've got a unique, we've got a unique episode coming up next week.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it's not gonna involve fart buzzers, but we're gonna do something very, very unique.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_03: We're going to be proving how many mistakes AI gives people.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna try.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I've already tried.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_03: You've already done it.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_03: Incorrect information all over AI.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_03: What people are actually using it.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, what write papers and lawyers.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_03: And the judge says, wait a minute, that case law doesn't even exist.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_03: AI made it up.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the point we're gonna make to you is you you can you can use AI to do searches and research, but you need to actually research the information that AI gives you to make sure that it's accurate.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you can't just go on Google and hit that AI mode and ask a question and then just copy down everything you get.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_01: You need to follow links, you need to go come uh confirm that information uh because a lot of a lot of incorrect stuff is coming across the transom there.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Clayton was having a verbal conversation with AI through his computer and he sent it to me and we laughed so hard.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we're gonna put that in next week's episode as well.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_03: It it's hilarious.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_03: Clayton's really good at that.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_01: All right, folks.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if uh you got a manuscript, maybe it's a bestseller.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you go ahead and call up booklocker.com.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, don't call us.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: Email us.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_03: Go to publishing.booklocker.com.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_03: That shows all the packages and prices and services and everything.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: We're a family-owned company and we've been in business twenty-seven years.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we're gonna treat you right.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: You send us an email, guess who's gonna answer you?
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: Me, the president and CEO of the company.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: Try getting that from one of the big book publishers.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I got the easy job.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we got cover designers, interior designers, ebook designers, people working with Amazon, people working with the printer and the distributor and everything.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_03: And I just have to answer emails.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_03: Great.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_03: Answer emails.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, and edit books.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I don't edit all of our books.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_03: No, I actually get to choose which ones I want to edit.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_03: I send in the rest to Professor Clayton Jones.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: So But come see us, booklocker.com, publishing Publishing.booklocker.com.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: At publishing.booklocker.com.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that pretty much wraps it up for the writer for this episode.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: So uh thanks for listening.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: Hope y'all learned a little and had some fun and got some interesting facts here that you can share with your friends and yeah, and keep it family friendly.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_03: And uh click on the uh comments button under this episode.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we'd love to hear what you think about it.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and let us know if you've got other similar stories.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_03: We'll post them under this on the website.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_01: All right, that's it.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: We will see y'all again on the next episode of the Writers Weekly Podcast.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_03: Bye, everybody.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_01: Bye.