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The official podcast from the team at BookFunnel, hosted by Jack Shilkaitis, Kelli Tanzi, and Emma Alisyn, featuring guest interviews, self-publishing industry discussions, and tips for using BookFunnel to build an author business.
0:00: And I run my Kickstarters, but I always bring my students into the back office as co-authors, so they can actually ride the coattails and watch how I'm building and running a Kickstarter, so they know how to do it.
0:12: And Oriental Lecker from Kickstarter, she comes every year, talks to our program.
0:17: She loves that we're training the students how to use Kickstarter, and we've had like 7 or 8 of our students go off to, to run their own success.
0:25: One of the things at the end of this whole big thing, we deliver.
0:28: The students, this big gnarly spreadsheet.
0:31: Here's the publisher, their expenses, and how much money the publisher made.
0:35: And here's the author, Western Colorado University, how much did they make.
0:38: And here's the bookstore, Wort Fire Shop, and this is how much they make, and you really get to see.
0:45: Where in this whole industry, where the money goes, and, and guess who makes the most money?
0:50: Hey, folks.
0:51: Welcome to the Book Funnel podcast where indie authors get real-world advice on writing, publishing, and growing a career on their own terms.
0:59: Whether you're just starting out or you're deep into your author journey, we're here to help you build your readership.
1:04: Boost your book sales and connect with your audience.
1:07: Each episode, we aim to bring you insights from authors, experts, and industry insiders who have been there, done that, and then some.
1:14: My name is Jack.
1:15: I am our lead author support specialist here at Book Funnel.
1:18: And I am joined today by my co-host, Emma Allison.
1:22: Hello.
1:23: And our guest for this episode of the Book Funnel podcast, a man who really needs no introduction, but I'll do it anyway, International bestselling author, indie publisher, co-producer of the Dune TV show based on his novels, Kevin J.
1:39: Anderson.
1:40: Sir, good to have you on podcast.
1:42: Hey B funnel, good to, good to see you.
1:44: Like, you are, you are book funnel together.
1:47: Yes, yes.
1:48: I wanna start with a story.
1:50: I've told this story on the podcast.
1:52: I know I've told it on webinars a few times when you, your name has come up, and I don't know if you recall this.
1:57: I'm not trying to put you on the spot here at all, but the first time I met you was in, 2023, the last 20 books conference, and I think it was Tuesday night of the conference.
2:08: This was my first time going, coming to a conference for Book Funnel.
2:11: It was me and Damon and Julie, and that was it.
2:13: And Damon tells me, hey, get ready, we're gonna go have dinner with Kevin.
2:16: And he just says, Kevin.
2:17: He doesn't specify that it is, in fact, Kevin J.
2:20: Anderson.
2:21: And so we go to dinner, I'm sitting there with Damon and you, and we've got your, your wife is there as well, and there were some other guests with us.
2:28: And you noted at the end of the night that I wasn't all that talkative.
2:32: And that's because halfway through the conversation, I realized I was sitting there with Kevin J.
2:36: Anderson.
2:37: And I did not know what to say.
2:39: I was ill prepared, so I don't know if you remember that or not, but Well, the thing is, when you get me and Damon at a table together, that you don't have to be talkative because we're kind of both going 1 mile a minute anyway.
2:52: That is true.
2:52: And you guys did a lot of the talking for me.
2:55: And I, and I appreciated that.
2:57: In my defense, the next day I was sick.
2:59: I don't know about you, but I was sick the rest of that conference.
3:02: So sadly, I did not get to follow up.
3:04: I think you gave it to all of us.
3:07: It could have been.
3:07: That's what I remember about the meeting that that jack guy got us all sick.
3:12: There you go.
3:13: There you go.
3:13: As a counterpoint to your story, what's funny is the first time that I met Damon was at a, at a Las Vegas writers conference.
3:21: It was a completely different.
3:22: It was an anthology workshop, I think, and, and I didn't know who Damon was.
3:26: In fact, I, I didn't even know what.
3:28: Book funnel was, we were just kind of starting out.
3:32: and, and Damon is, is sort of a larger than life and he talks a lot.
3:36: And he was kind of geeking out fanboy stuff too.
3:39: So I sent him some books, but that was, so I, in addition to other things about 2009, 2010, I founded Wordfire Press.
3:49: I was early on in the indie publishing movement because, I've had, I mean, I had a really, really strong career in traditional publishing.
3:59: I had 50 bestsellers and millions of copies in print, and like, I, I thought I had it made.
4:05: I was going to keep writing Star Wars books.
4:07: I'm gonna keep writing, writing all this stuff, you know, I'm, I'm just like whistling past the graveyard and I didn't realize that the ground was like collapsing beneath my feet because The world that I had it made in suddenly changed, you know, the asteroid hit and wiped out the dinosaurs, but I was kind of in the catbird seat for the beginning of indie publishing because here I was a very successful author, and I had written dozens of my own books.
4:35: That were all out of print because back in those days in red Publishing, you had a book come out and it was there for a couple of years and then they let it go out of print.
4:43: And what happened back then, authors whined and complained, oh, you let my book go out of print, and, and then it would never see the light of day again.
4:51: People would have to haunt used bookstores to find battered old copies.
4:55: And I had had all these books published before I was, before I had my, my new name of New York Times bestselling author Kevin J.
5:03: Anderson.
5:03: And so I had all these books that came out and, you know, not many people bought them and they went out of print.
5:08: And then suddenly I've got millions of fans who are thinking, oh, I want to read Kevin's early books, and they can't find them anywhere.
5:13: And so back in the early days of indie publishing, I, I just wrote the old publishers and say, hey, you're never going to republish Resurrection Inc.
5:21: Can you just give me the rights back?
5:23: And back then, they said, Sure, we're not doing anything with them.
5:27: And I got all these rights back.
5:28: And so when we formed Wordfire Press, I, I mean, I learned how to do my own Kindle ebooks and, you know, the print on demand stuff came later.
5:38: Suddenly, when this started, I'm this guy that had a fan base and I had a dozen books that I could release.
5:44: I mean, you, you can't be in a better position than that.
5:46: And so I like went, I kind of like this indie publishing stuff and I started publishing a bunch of my books and I had a whole bunch.
5:54: of other famous author friends who were like older farts like me that had their careers, but, but they were also seeing the changes that, wait, I've got all these books out of print and publishing's changing, and what is this e-book stuff going on?
6:11: But they didn't want to learn how to do it.
6:13: And so they said, hey Kevin, why don't you publish my books and then we'll just split the money.
6:18: Well, I offered that.
6:19: And then, so I, like, within a very rapid time, I suddenly had 50 books in my catalog and I started publishing them and, and this was the gold rush days.
6:30: You could just put up anything and people would buy it because there weren't very many titles out there.
6:34: And that's, that's how I established Wordfire Press and kind of myself in the indie movement.
6:40: Back in 2010 when it was really pretty brand new, this, this Las Vegas conference I was saying about where I first met Damon, we didn't know what Book Funnel was and I couldn't like, that's to send out book review copies.
6:52: What is that for?
6:54: And because we weren't even thinking about self-delivery of our own books.
6:58: It was up on Amazon.
7:00: And, and Damon spent a lot of time talking with me about, hey, here's all the stuff that Book Funnel can do and And very early on, Wordfire Press kind of subscribed and got our plan, and we, we used it at first to be firing out book review copies of all of our new books.
7:16: So, after reprinting all of these books by all my famous author friends, see, we don't always make good decisions.
7:22: So our next decision was like, hey, why don't we get a bunch of brand new books that were unedited.
7:27: Did by a bunch of totally, totally unknown authors, and we'll publish them and the authors will be so excited they'll promote the crap out of these books.
7:35: And we published all these books that the authors never did anything for.
7:40: And then, and then nobody bought them.
7:41: So we had a, we had a, well, it's not that bad.
7:44: I mean, we still managed to sell some, but, but it was a learning experience and, and so this is what, however many years that was 1515, 16 years ago.
7:54: So we, we've, the last 4 or 5 years, we've kind of changed at Wordfire Press that instead we were publishing 4 or 5 books a month, just by, by all these different authors.
8:05: And guess who the best selling author was in our Word Fire Press?
8:09: Kevin J.
8:09: Anderson.
8:10: So we decided, you know, maybe we should just focus on my books and my new things and, and we still publish the other ones, but we're not actively seeking out things anymore.
8:19: And then the whole, whole.
8:21: indie world keeps changing because I'm, I kind of dove into doing Kickstarters, and that's how I'm funding.
8:28: So a Kickstarter is effectively like Trad Publishing.
8:32: You can, you as an author get an advance for your book, except the fans are the ones that pay your advance, and it's nice to have money in the bank while you're writing the book and getting paid for it.
8:41: So, so I run Kickstarters, and when you have 900 backers that all need an ebook, I don't really want to send an email.
8:49: Email saying, here's a file attached.
8:51: So book funnel has, has really, really changed how we do things.
8:56: So as you can see, I'm, I'm not letting you get a chance to even ask any questions.
8:59: So, hey, sometimes you just have to sit at the feet of the master.
9:02: I'd rather take a drink of coffee while you figure out what to talk about.
9:05: By all means, it's, it's interesting because I, I'm, I'm sure you have stuff to say on this too.
9:11: The one thing I'll say that's interesting is you're talking about your first time meeting Damon and hearing about.
9:16: Funnel.
9:16: And for me, David and I were friends.
9:19: We had the same editor, and that's how we met.
9:21: And so we were both writing our first books, talking to each other, and he starts talking to me about this idea he has for delivering books directly.
9:28: And at this point didn't have a name.
9:30: And I'm, I'm sitting there scratching my head like, but what does this have to do about writing the next book?
9:35: Like, I don't know what, what this is about.
9:37: And then, you know, life happened for both of us, and we got reconnected a few years later, and he's like, hey, so I'm doing this book funnel thing.
9:43: And I'm like, wait, I put 22 and 2 together.
9:46: That was your idea, and here it is.
9:48: And he's like, do you want a job?
9:49: And here I am.
9:50: So, I think a lot of people were in the same boat and just couldn't quite see the vision that Damon had.
9:56: Some people, of course, you know, figured it out pretty quick, you know, like yourself, and adopted it, because things have changed so much in publishing, like you said, in the last decade or two.
10:06: And there's a lot of folks that have adapted, and there's a lot of folks that have Not in that process though, you, I imagine there's, there's like you, that learning experience you had publishing other authors' books, you'll learn a lot by actually doing the work of being a publisher.
10:22: There's probably a lot of knowledge you gained.
10:24: I loved it.
10:25: The the problem was there's only 40 hours in a day and I just can't do everything, and I was very proud to be able to look, our books looked great.
10:33: I know what I'm doing as far as designing books and, and we had great cover.
10:37: Designers and so even, even if they didn't sell millions of copies, I would put any of our Wordfire Press books up against anything that Bantam or HarperCollins published to mine.
10:47: And I would go, guys, look what we can do.
10:50: And it just really blew my mind.
10:52: I'm still in the trad world, like my Dune books and things.
10:55: We still work with major New York publishers, but like, for instance, I just had my Kickstarter last year was for a big epic fantasy trilogy called Terra Incognita.
11:04: And we did the full-on leatherette slipcase gold embossed with tipped in ribbons and illustrations and, and I did that myself.
11:15: I mean, I laid everything up in vellum and I hired the illustrations and we got all this, this stuff in it, and I sent it to my, my New York agent who deals with, you know, Simon and Schuster and everybody, and they just said, here's what I did out of my garage, and, and he's like, how can you do this stuff and In fact, I'll, I'm going to get off on a tangent, which is really important and it's really interesting that that Damon and I were talking about it and it, it's starting to be my, my new soapbox because I still talk to my agent.
11:48: We just had a guest speaker at my, my university program.
11:51: We'll talk about that in a minute, but who is another traditional agent who sold millions of copies in the traditional way.
11:58: Another one of my early agents, Richard Curtis, just published a book called Digital Inc.
12:03: which I'll I'll recommend it.
12:05: You guys might want to look at it, Digital Ink by Richard Curtis.
12:08: It's, he was there as a New York agent at the very beginning of e-books, like in the 1996 when people were starting to talk about doing them.
12:18: And, and this is sort of his chronicle about going all the way through the evolution of like how e-books have changed everything, but They are all sort of in their, in their bubble.
12:31: They, they don't really see the indie world, that, oh, how quaint you're self-publishing things.
12:36: And he had something at the very end that, well, statistics still show that print books outsell e-books by 3 to 1.
12:44: And anybody who's working in indie publishing kind of scratches their head, go, print books to e-books is 3 to 1?
12:51: Really?
12:52: Yeah, yeah, I sounded like Damon there.
12:53: Really?
12:55: And, and I have done, at Superstars writing seminar, which we'll also talk about.
13:00: We, we had a, a big red editor.
13:03: , who was there as a guest speaker, and we were on this panel, the indie versus traditional publishing, you know, the SmackDown thing, and she sat there with, with her full, well, you know, it's nice what you guys are doing, but print books still outsell ebooks by 3 to 1.
13:20: We had, you know, these names, James Hunter, Dakota Crow, Michael Anderley.
13:25: They're in the audience and Michael Anderley like literally.
13:27: spoke up, your numbers are whacked.
13:30: And I had them each.
13:33: James Hunter said, Well, this is how much I make a month in my e-book sales.
13:36: Dakota Kraus said, this is how much I make a month in ebook sales.
13:39: And Miche Anderle said, This is how much I make a month in ebook sales.
13:43: And this editor's eyes are just like, you can, you can see going into shock, but those numbers can't be true.
13:49: And of course, the numbers that Michael and Dakota and James were talking about, they're all e-books.
13:54: Their print sales are utterly minimal.
13:57: And just this past weekend, Eamon was talking to me, he said, and he was gonna find the actual numbers for it, but Book Funnel delivers something like 2 million e-books to various customers a month.
14:09: And so my thing is, those 2 million e-books that Book Funnel is distributing are not tracked by any system that these trad editors can see.
14:18: It's something called BookScan.
14:19: These are the books.
14:20: Books that are like sold over Barnes and Noble and things and they're, I don't know where they get their ebook numbers because Amazon doesn't share.
14:27: And, and so that's 2 billion books a month that aren't even on ebooks a month that aren't even on anybody's radar.
14:34: And all of the Michael Anderley, the Dakota Krauts, these are all, a lot of them are KU, they're just Amazon only.
14:40: They aren't tracked by anything.
14:43: And so when, when somebody says print books outsell ebooks by 3 to 1, it's like saying, In the US, American-made cars outsell foreign-made cars by 3 to 1.
14:56: Our statistics do not include numbers from Toyota, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, or Volkswagen.
15:02: And I really think that the people in the traditional half of publishing are utterly blind to how many e-books are being sold out there that are off their radar.
15:14: So that was my soapbox.
15:15: I wanted to get going on that one.
15:16: Well, but, but I, I think you're right.
15:18: I think there's some blindness to that data, just with the way the whole situation is, is set up, like you said, even just with Amazon, if you discount.
15:26: Those 2 million books the Book Funnel, delivers every month, all the books that are being purchased on Amazon or read through KU aren't showing up in those statistics.
15:35: And I would, I would imagine if I were somebody in the traditional publishing world, I would be looking at this and seeing something that like, we need to be paying attention to this at this point, right?
15:47: If, if not sooner, you know, than, than now, this is something that we should be embracing rather than, I, I personally don't, we are.
15:56: Yeah, exactly.
15:57: And those who are, I think are gonna be the ones that, you know, just, it's just like our, you know, we still have one local Sears location in, in my area, central Iowa.
16:08: I think it's the only one in Iowa that I know of, but Sears used to be everywhere.
16:13: It was ubiquitous, and the industries change.
16:16: And if you don't, if you don't change as they change, and we're, and we're changing, and that.
16:21: And look, that's a perfect segue for me to, to talk about the thing that I, that I kind of wanted to come here to talk about.
16:27: So, I, I run a master's degree program, a graduate program at Western Colorado University, and it's, it's for an MA, Master of Arts in publishing.
16:37: And they came to me like 78 years ago and said, hey, you want, you want to form our, our publishing program?
16:44: And one of, one of the things that I love to talk about for How to actually make a living as a writer is that you need to have multiple income streams, and sure, I've got all my indie stuff, and sure, I've got my Kickstarters, and sure I do some traditional publishing and teaching publishing is, since we live in the United States, for creatives who are freelancers, getting health insurance is pretty darn hard.
17:08: And so by, by working at a university, I could actually covered with health insurance and And so I said they wanted to pick me to form this, this publishing program because I've had a long and storied career in traditional publishing, but I also was one of the first people that started a major indie press, and I've been doing that like crazy.
17:29: And so we formed this, this master's degree program.
17:33: That was, well, at the beginning, it was literally 50/50.
17:36: Half of the courses were trad publishing and half of the courses were, were indie.
17:40: And I started looking around at, at other graduate programs in publishing, and they're all kind of old school.
17:46: They're teaching you how to do trad publishing and how to get a job as an assistant editor at Simon and Schuster and living in New York with 5 other roommates because you're only making $23,000 a year.
17:59: And I started thinking, Everybody that I know from 20 books and from superstars and from all these places, I think the people who are going into publishing, they're going to dive headfirst into their own indie stuff.
18:13: And so half of the curriculum is, is on indie publishing, and, and we teach, we teach all the steps on how to do it.
18:21: And first I gotta say, I am not an academic at all.
18:24: I'm nothing about the theoretical philosophy behind the printing press.
18:29: I want you to actually make a book.
18:30: And when I put this together, this program, I was thinking, well, what would I want to know?
18:36: And the thing is with indie publishing, we are all learning this at warp speed and, and things are changing all the time.
18:43: Book funnels adding everything, new things all the time.
18:46: And so you can't just, well, I'm going to write a lecture and just teach the same thing for 7 years in a row.
18:52: So that makes it harder because I have to still follow up on these things, but I need to to keep my business running.
18:58: And so I'm very pragmatic, and what I decided to do was to have the students.
19:03: Learn how to do indie publishing, how to do their books.
19:06: And so they do these two major hands-on projects from start to finish.
19:12: they produce a fine new edition of a classic public domain work, like a Jules Verne or Charles Dickens or something like that, that my own publishing house, Wordfire Press, publishes it.
19:23: We have a whole line called Wordfire Classics.
19:25: And so these students Pick a book that they want that we teach them all about copyright so they can figure out, is it really in the public domain or not, and they choose a book they want to do and, and we don't let them pick something like Around the world in 80 days that there's 700 editions of.
19:42: They got to find something that's a little bit more obscure.
19:45: And boy, they found some great things.
19:47: So we had, somebody found the very first science fiction novel written by a person of color.
19:54: It was in like 1916 or something like that.
19:57: And it was long out of print, but We just printed it.
20:00: So, they find the text.
20:02: They, they, they scan it, they proofread it, they design their own cover.
20:06: We teach them in design, they build their own cover.
20:10: they all have to buy vellum and they lay out their book from start to finish.
20:13: They find somebody to write a foreword, some scholar or a famous writer or something, because if you don't have new content in it, then Amazon doesn't like to put up just another public domain work.
20:25: We teach them canvas so that they could do their social media ads.
20:29: A lot of them make their own book trailers, and then they, they release the book.
20:33: But the, the other project that they do, which I think is really cool, is they do an original professional anthology that they that they edit and put together.
20:43: We, we have a lot of support from Draft to Digital, and they give us $5000 every year so that we can pay pro rates for an anthology, and the students come up with whatever they want to do.
20:54: We've had Merciless Mermaids and Chaotic Cupids and And the one that they're doing this year is called Into the Deep Dark Woods.
21:01: And so they, they brainstorm, they come up with the idea for the anthology, and then they send out the call for submissions.
21:08: We use something called Moksha, which is a submissions intake, app, and they read the submissions.
21:14: And for Into the Deep Dark Woods, we got 998 stories that came in because we pay 6 cents a word, so people come in.
21:23: So we have 12 students and they're going through this flood of 998 submissions, and, and I'll tell you a secret, they're not all very good.
21:31: And so they're able, I mean, they're able to reject the, the, the, the bottom tier pretty fast.
21:37: And they go through those and they write their.
21:38: Rejections and then they go through a second round and write another rejection, and they go through, but I hold them, I hold their feet to the fire.
21:46: You've got $5000.
21:47: You can't spend any more money than that.
21:49: You've got to buy that many stories, and they've got to budget it.
21:52: They've got to figure out how many words they can buy.
21:54: And that's all they can do.
21:56: So then they have to, they got about 70 some stories that they all loved, but we could only buy 28, and so we had what we call the thunderdome call, like 2 stories enter, one story leaves.
22:09: And they have to fight over, you know, which ones go in, and when at the end of the day, they, they had to write out their last rejections, and then they sent out the contracts.
22:18: But what was really, really instructive for them reading through the slush pile is they understood, wait a second, just because it got rejected didn't mean the story is bad, that they might have had 5 stories about Japanese mermaids.
22:30: Well, you can't have 5 stories about Japanese mermaids in the book.
22:33: And, and these, these stories were really good.
22:37: And so then they sent out the contracts and then they'll work with the authors to copy edit them and they're again they're designing the cover and then they'll put the book together, to mention at first that this is all online.
22:50: It's all online except for, for one week residency in the beautiful mountains of Colorado, Chucky Darns, you know, you have to spend a week in the mountains of Colorado.
22:59: I was, I was thinking, can I convince my wife to let.
23:04: And if it's, but if it's mostly virtual, I might be able to get away with it is, it is truly virtual, and, and there's a one week in person in Colorado in July.
23:13: And so we, we meet for one week, and it's a one year program.
23:17: It's July to July and you're done.
23:19: And you meet the first of July.
23:21: That's where you meet everybody, and that's where they come up with the idea for their anthology.
23:25: They brainstorm it.
23:26: They write their call for submissions.
23:27: They send it out, and then they all go home and then they spend everything for the next fall semester and the spring semester doing everything up.
23:34: And then the final July they come out for a week.
23:37: And we have this incredible gala book launch party.
23:40: So we released the anthology and release all of their classic books that they produced, and it's in the big university center on campus in in Gunnison, Colorado, and we have hundreds of people come and we, we print the books and we sell them and and that's, and the money that this stuff earns.
24:00: Is what we use to pay a whole bunch of scholarships and travel grants and everything for the, the students.
24:05: But here's one of the really cool things.
24:07: So, so Wordfire Press is the publisher, right?
24:10: And publishers always, what we do is we, Wordfire Press splits 50/50.
24:15: So the author gets 50% of the earnings and the publisher gets it because I have to pay for my electricity and my, my employees and everything.
24:24: Overhead.
24:25: The author is Western Colorado University.
24:28: So the author gets their, their royalties.
24:30: But for this big book launch, a bookstore has to sell all the books.
24:34: You know, we order like 50 copies of the hardcover anthology, we order 20 copies of all the other.
24:39: So a bookstore actually has to buy the books from the publisher at 40% discount, which is what happens.
24:46: Any other bookstore buys the books from a publisher.
24:48: Well, as a separate company, I own like a traveling online bookstore and things like that.
24:53: And so, our bookstore buys all these books from Wordfire Press at 40% discount.
24:59: And then we sell them at this event.
25:01: One of the things at the end of this whole big thing, we deliver to the students this big gnarly spreadsheet that I usually convince one of the students to do because they know more about spreadsheets than I do.
25:13: And so they literally see all the way through, OK, here's the publisher, their expenses, and how much money the publisher made.
25:20: And here's the author, Western Colorado University, how much did they make?
25:23: And here's the bookstore, Word Fire Shop.
25:26: And this is how much they made, and you really get to see where in this whole industry where the money goes and, and guess who makes the most money.
25:35: Who do you think makes the most money of that?
25:37: I'm gonna have to say, Emma, did you have a guess?
25:40: I'll let you go first, Emma.
25:41: Yeah, Emma, stop talking so author.
25:43: I'm a pessimist, so I'm gonna say not the author.
25:45: Well, I, I'm gonna contradict that and say the author.
25:48: Well, I'm gonna tell you that it's the bookstore that makes by far the most money.
25:51: , well, in, in our case, the author and the publisher make the same amount of money because we split fifty-fifty, and, and, and it's decent, but, but the ones that make the most money is the bookstore.
26:05: However, the bookstore has the most risk because they're buying all these books, and if it's a tornado that night and nobody shows up, they're stuck with a whole bunch of books that they didn't sell.
26:16: Right, so, you know, there's, and you have inventory to manage and, and all that stuff in a retail business, they go through all of that.
26:23: And the other thing is that, well, you kind of led into all this from the whole beginning.
26:27: I know everybody in the publishing world.
26:29: I know all the indie authors.
26:30: I know Damon, I know, I know Drafted Digital.
26:33: I, I, I know Kobo.
26:35: I, I know all these people, and I bring them on as guest speakers.
26:39: So like every single week we've got some head of industry showing up to talk to our class.
26:45: And in fact this Saturday we've got Ricardo Fle from Reedsi who is gonna, gonna talk and we've had the New York agent, we've had Jonathan Mayberry, a New York Times bestselling author, we've got a big newsletter person.
26:58: We've got Oriental Leckert, the head of Kickstarter, who's publishing Kickstarter, who's gonna Come in and talk, and that's, that's kind of another thing.
27:06: So I, I always run Kickstarters.
27:09: That's, I do like 2 a year, I guess that's not always, but I do about 2 a year, and I run my Kickstarters, but I always bring my students into the back office as co-authors so they can actually ride the coattails and watch how I'm building and running a Kickstarter, so they know how to do it.
27:26: And Arietta Leckard from Kickstarter, she comes every year, talks to our program.
27:31: She loves that we're training the students how to use Kickstarter, and we've had like 7 or 8 of our students go off to, to run their own successful Kickstarters, kind of watches them and, and blesses them with that.
27:44: So I'm, I'm kind of ranting about this, but it's like, I wish I had had this program when I was starting out, and that was my, my main thing is they're gonna get stuff that they know how to use and work.
27:55: Well, as you, you're touching like every corner of the publishing, the publishing industry, obviously different authors are gonna sometimes really focus on one versus the other.
28:05: I know there's some authors out there who, you know, all that publishing knowledge, I think would be, would be great for them, but maybe their, their focus is on Amazon KU, and so they need a limited scope of, of that, right?
28:17: But there's still so much, there's so much value in, in knowing how the nuts and bolts of the business work at the end of the day, and that's kind of my.
28:24: My philosophy from, from the very beginning that I want you to do every single step of it yourself by hand so that you know how it works and in theory, you're gonna hire a cover designer or you're gonna hire somebody to make your book trailer for you.
28:39: But, and again, we have the guy from Reedy on Saturday and Reedsy is where you go to get all these different, different things.
28:46: But in, in, in the worst-case scenario when everybody just drops the ball and it doesn't happen and you need to get your book out, well, if you're burning in midnight Oil, you know how to design your own cover if you have to, and you know how to do vellum if you have to, and you know how to upload it if you have to, and you know, it's just really.
29:05: We even had a, a very diehard indie author who was interested in the program.
29:10: He just went, Well, I only want to take the indie courses.
29:13: I don't want to take any of the trad courses.
29:15: I go, Yeah, but you still kind of need to know how the industry works, and he's, he just, he didn't get it until I said, look, If you want to be a rock musician, it's still a good idea if you understand Beethoven and Mozart and how classical music works.
29:31: Even if you're not going to write classical music, if you want to be a musician, it's good to understand all this stuff.
29:37: And, and even in Trad publishing, there are still things like professional book reviews and bookstore distribution.
29:44: Even indie authors would like to see their books in Barnes and Noble, and, and it's possible if you jump through the hoops, and I don't because then you got to make your books returnable and you might end up getting burned that way and stuff, right.
29:59: So anyway, the industry is, the industry is always changing too.
30:02: And so in fact, there are, I, I just read an article in Publishers Weekly that there is now this whole, I forget the name of it, but there's this group of like indie publishers that are that are forming something to, to get.
30:14: Your indie books into brick and mortar bookstores.
30:18: You know, that I have no doubt that before long it's going to happen, that it'll change that if you're a local indie author, you can get your book into your local bookstores and do a book signing at the Barnes and Noble, for sure, which is every author's dream.
30:33: Yeah, yeah, and, and even, you know, in the, in the meantime too, there are plenty of other local bookstores.
30:40: I know Studio Moonfall in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
30:44: Donovan Shearer is, shout out to, to you, Donovan.
30:48: He goes to a lot of these, these big book events too, like he's at Reader Nation in Las Vegas.
30:54: It's kind of strategic for him, because the authors will show up there with all their books, they'll have a whole ton of excess that they didn't sell, and then he'll take them back to his store in Kenosha and sell them there and So he really focuses on indie.
31:07: So I, I think there's definitely gonna be some movement in that regard.
31:11: But even now, get out there, find those indie bookstores in your area, so that when Barnes and Noble does see the light, you've had some practice.
31:18: You've done this before.
31:19: You've gotten your foot in the door.
31:21: Well, and another big thing that, that we do and I've done for many years is we show up at at Comic Cons, at library talks and things, and you have your own table and you sell your own books and You make a lot more money when you sell your own books.
31:37: Remember, the bookstore is the one that makes the most money.
31:39: So if you're the bookstore and you sell your books, and here's, here's another dirty little secret.
31:44: If you're random, random jack sitting there with the book that you published and you're at a table and, and reader walks.
31:52: By, you're a magical person because you published a book and your name is on the cover, and it doesn't matter that they've never heard of you.
31:59: You really wrote that book and you could autograph a copy for them and they'll buy it.
32:04: I have done this recently, actually.
32:05: I did at my local mall in December.
32:08: It's just a small business event.
32:10: And I showed up there, and there's people like, people selling 3D printed stuff and somebody selling like, you know, Tupperware and whatnot, and I'm just, you know, they're in the middle of the mall.
32:22: And yeah, it's, it is magical.
32:23: And just as an author too, like, for sure, on the business side of things, it absolutely makes sense.
32:30: But as an author, just having those experiences where readers come up and like, you know, they've never seen me before, never seen my book before, but they're drawn in and they're interested and really, it's really kind of fulfilling and motivating.
32:42: And so we, we teach the students that how a lot of them go off and they publish their own books and they do so we're We're open for applications now.
32:49: It closes in May, and I think you're gonna put the link somewhere.
32:53: It's, it's Western Colorado University Publishing if you Google that, but, but I'd, I'd rather you look at, I've got to write up on my own website, Wordfire.com.
33:03: Because that's written in non-academic speak, you can do that.
33:07: But yeah, we, we start in July and for one week in person and then it's all online.
33:11: I think the total cost for the program is $26,000 for a master's degree.
33:17: You get your famous master's certificate and everything like that.
33:21: So again, I, I, because you're watching the book Funnel podcast, you are self-selected as somebody I want in the program, and I mean, I.
33:30: So the university was thinking about, well, we could, we could advertise and like, like literary journals and things.
33:36: I went, that's, that's not necessarily the audience that I'm, I'm shooting for.
33:41: We'd burn those people out if they're looking at writing a poem poem every 6 weeks.
33:46: I went, nope, that's not our people.
33:48: Nope, we're the 5 books a year kind of people that we're shooting for.
33:51: Yeah, and there, there's a ton of authors in our audience that I know are, are gonna see that and jump at it.
33:57: So I, I think it's perfectly aligned.
33:59: And of course we love working with you too.
34:02: and Damon usually comes as a guest speaker every year to talk about.
34:05: So we use a lot of book funnel things, right?
34:08: And, and, and that's actually something that I wanted to, because we talked a little bit before we started recording.
34:13: You have a Kickstarter coming up for a new Dan Shambles zombie PI, yeah, well, so here's, this is what's really, this is like made me see the light, how amazing this stuff was, so.
34:27: I had this series that I just loved.
34:30: It's called Dan Shambles Zombie PI and it's kind of like the naked Gun meets the Addams Family.
34:35: It's like, like very silly.
34:37: He's a noir detective, he's a zombie, and he solves crimes with ghosts and mummies and werewolves and vampires, and then he's in the unnatural quarter, and it's full of dad jokes, and it's dumb puns and, and, and it's really, really funny and, and like a sight gag that like there's, there's a bicycle built for two just going by and it's it's Being peddled by two tentacled demons that they're just riding down the street, the little, little things like that.
35:02: And I sold the 1st 3 books to a trad publisher, and like these are fast.
35:09: They're, they're like 70,000 words.
35:11: They're fast and they're funny, and you read one and you want the next one right away.
35:15: And I'm a fast writer, so we sold them 3 books, and I said, OK, let's go, let's publish these like 6 months apart, and instead they brought them out a year and a half apart.
35:25: And they also did, trade paperbacks for $15 and the e-book was $15.
35:33: And we were like, but why would you put an ebook at $15?
35:36: That doesn't make any sense.
35:37: And because we don't want to cut into our print sales.
35:40: I, that makes no sense at all.
35:41: And so they came out a year and a half and, and so the sales weren't, were disappointing as far as the e-books and everything.
35:48: But I wanted, I love the series.
35:50: I wanted it to go, and I like begged and groveled.
35:53: I said, please do another book.
35:55: And so they, they grudgingly published 1/4 book.
35:58: I, I took a 50% pay cut just to write that book, and, and they went, see, it didn't sell.
36:04: And I, so I published my own at Wordfire Press.
36:08: So I published a short story collection, and then I, I thought, well, I really like this, so I just published my own, the next volume in the book called Tastes Like.
36:18: Chicken.
36:18: And then I eventually got the rights back from the trad publisher.
36:22: So I reprinted the Wordfire Press editions of the Dan Shamblell series.
36:26: So by now I had like 7 of them.
36:28: You know, I, I wrote one by myself and, and just published it, and it did OK.
36:33: But not like, oh, I'm going to stop writing Dune novels to do, to do a Dan Shamblell book.
36:38: But the fans kept asking for a new one.
36:41: And so I, I kind of got this, this, I saw the light and I thought I had a good, good friend of mine, Dean Wesley Smith, who said, Why don't you run a Kickstarter?
36:49: And I said, Well, I've never run a Kickstarter before.
36:51: And so he convinced me and, and I, so I did a Kickstarter for a brand new Dan Shamblell novel.
36:56: All right guys, if you really want more Dan Shamblell novels, then see, put your money where your mouth is.
37:02: Wham bam, that Kickstarter did 5 times what the red publisher ever paid me for the Dan Shamble books.
37:08: And I went, I like this.
37:10: And so I have since done several more Dan Shamble books all funded by by Kickstarter.
37:16: And here's the thing, I, I had some, some film and TV interest in the Dan Shamble property, but you know it was out of print from the Trad Pub.
37:24: But by the studio seeing the fans jump after this in the Kickstarter, whoa, he must have a lot of people interested in this.
37:33: So we've just sold it as a TV series.
37:35: It'll be still a lot of hush hush on the details, but it'll be, filmed in Europe, a new studio, and I'm writing the pilot.
37:42: I'm the executive producer, and that's going, so we have a, so I'm writing the, the, the brand new book called Sleep with the Fishes, and we have the brand new announcement.
37:51: Announcement for this Dan Chambell TV show and we just dropped our landing page a couple of days ago and I, I think Jack, you can put the, the link for the landing page in there.
38:01: And, and the thing is, to get, I want you to sign up in the landing page so that I can let you know the Kickstarter goes, but you'll also, we're gonna put you on the studio's press release list so that if when things happen for the Dan Shamblell show, you'll get the press release the same time that the Hollywood Reporter gets it.
38:20: And, and that's, and it's actually verified from the studio rather than somebody on X posted something that they heard on a Reddit chain or something.
38:29: And, you know, just to be nice to you, the early adopters that you get a free unabridged audiobook of my hilarious fantasy thing called Skeleton in the Closet.
38:38: So, so this is, we build up for the Kickstarter by the pre-launch page and, and I'm, I'm, I'm building the Kickstarter.
38:45: That will launch on early March, like March 3rd or something like, like, I can't remember the date.
38:51: But here's, and I'm gonna, gonna kick it back to you to let you guys talk about this.
38:55: And just told me last Saturday about this new thing Book Funnel has offering signed and personalized e-books through Buck Funnel.
39:03: And so I've already written it and said I want to put that in my Kickstarter.
39:07: I want to make that an offer that, that if you get the e-book that I will sign and personalize it.
39:12: , for, for this one, it's called Sleep with the Fishes is the new one.
39:16: It's about a Sammy the sal, he's the new big fish in the unnatural quarter.
39:21: So the, the cover, go to the landing page, you gotta see the cover.
39:23: It's like this, this big salmon-headed guy in a pinstripe business suit, and, and I'll put it on the screen here too, so folks watching can see.
39:32: And so he's, it, it's funny.
39:34: So he's, he's got a, a strip club called Chumms.
39:37: He's got electric eels on the pole dance, and, and the prostitutes that work there are called fish hookers, and you know, it just.
39:45: That's what it, that's what Dan Shamble is all about.
39:47: It's just a lot of fun and, and his, his girlfriend is a real barracuda, and you know, it just goes, I'm here all night, so on and on.
39:55: So, why, why don't you guys tell us about this new autograph thing because it's kind of a brand new thing.
40:02: Take it away, Emma.
40:02: Do, because in Author Q we get a lot of questions from authors asking, how do we use this, and there's a couple of theories.
40:09: Should we give it out to everybody as like a perk, or should you make it exclusive?
40:15: Should you monetize it?
40:16: Like it exclusive to me?
40:20: We, we will just release new features for Kevin J.
40:23: Anderson.
40:24: Nobody else will have access to them right now.
40:27: But, but no, this, this has been a conversation of like, what, how to use this.
40:31: And there's a few, there's a few people immediately latched on to Kickstarter.
40:35: People immediately were like, oh, that's a great thing.
40:37: I can just add to my Kickstarter offerings there.
40:40: It's a, it's a, it's kind of, in that context.
40:43: It's kind of a low opportunity cost sort of thing.
40:45: You're probably going to be signing books for your Kickstarter backers anyway.
40:50: Why not do the same thing with ebooks, maybe for those who, you know, back you at a lower tier and maybe so they get that that same type of experience too.
40:59: They still get to get that sort of, you know, I got this book signed by the to to.
41:03: Charge an extra, I don't know, 5 bucks or 10 bucks for it, because it, it, I mean, it is an added, I have to go on my pad, I have to look at at at your thing that you wanted to Mimi, happy birthday.
41:15: I mean, there, there is extra work and hassle for me to do that, but I think it's a cool Saying the author and I were actually trying to figure out the math behind that the other day like, OK, if it takes this many hours to sign this many and an hour of my time is worth, then across my catalog, how much do you upcharge for your ebook?
41:37: Like, we all know, bro, we're figuring it out.
41:40: Well, I'm, I'm, it's gotta be 5 or 10 bucks.
41:43: I mean, that's, I, I don't want to charge more than, I don't like.
41:46: To charge for my autograph at all.
41:47: I mean, period.
41:48: I, I don't want to be like that guy from Jerry Maguire.
41:50: I only signed my brand of baseball cards and stuff.
41:53: I, I don't like, I feel if a fan brings a book to a book signing that I will, I will sign whatever they've got if they bring their battered old Young Jedi Knights books or if they bring, I mean, obviously the author, author wants you to show up at the book signing and buy the new book.
42:09: But of course, fans are fans, and I don't want to offend any fan.
42:13: If they're, if they're diehard fans of my Jedi Young Jedi Knights books, well, I'm still gonna make them happy.
42:18: I'm gonna sign the books.
42:19: It would be nice if they bought the new book, but I'm not gonna, I, I think you're kind of a, a jerk if you say, no, I won't sign it unless you buy the new one.
42:28: But, you know, I, I, I feel that it is.
42:33: In this Kickstarter thing, if I am going on my pad and I'm calling up backer number 73 wants it personalized to Jasmine, my dog, OK, that's extra, not just time for me, but it's the organization of that is a bit of a problem.
42:50: So yeah, and Book Funnel tries to make that as easy as possible.
42:54: I'm sure you've had the chance to play around with it say it's very hard.
42:56: So I can charge 10 bucks extra for, yes, it's, it's very difficult to use.
43:01: No, we, we try to make it as easy as possible.
43:04: And, and one of the, the other things I think another context where authors are using it and might be of interest to you is on Patreon.
43:13: Because I know you have a Patreon as well, and specifically in the context, not just giving every one of your patrons a signed e-book necessarily, but when you do Patreon live streams, those can turn into live book signings for your patrons.
43:26: Maybe not something that you would do a fully involved signature or a personalization, but you just sign and give away a few e-books to, to those who actually show up.
43:35: And maybe it's not everybody who gets one.
43:37: Things like that.
43:38: There's authors playing with it on social media too, so they have to.
43:42: I understand that this is why I wanted to do personalization, because if, if I just have a signature in the ebook, they're gonna assume I just did a PDF or a JPEG of my signature and plopped it in.
43:52: That isn't what this is a live signature that is different in your book than is in Emma's book, and, and, so it's an, but how do they know that unless it's personalized?
44:03: If they just see my, my signature in there.
44:06: In fact, there was a Robert Jordan book that came out after he had passed away.
44:11: And it has his signature on the title page, and I went, wait a second, I know when this came out.
44:17: Well, they just printed his autograph on the front page of every book.
44:20: And in fact, here's, here's pro tip for all of you guys who are gonna go and do a book signing.
44:25: I never ever sign in black ink.
44:28: I want it signed in blue ink or purple ink or green ink because that way they can see this was not printed in there.
44:34: This is somebody wrote it there.
44:36: That is a very good point.
44:39: I'm gonna, I have a whole kit for when I.
44:41: Go to these, these, yeah, don't use black because a month later they'll open it up.
44:46: It's a black ink on a black printed page that I'm gonna, yeah, I'm gonna chuck those black Sharpies out of, I have a kit with everything I need in it.
44:54: I'm gonna get to.
44:55: That's a very good point.
44:56: It's a very good point.
44:57: But yeah, the, the personalization aspect that we've had some authors ask too, like, so am I signing it once and you're just putting that in every book and I mean, that's something you could have done with Book Funnel already before we released this feature but just put it in a PDF and e-book files.
45:12: Exactly.
45:13: But this is about that author, you're getting the same kind of experience like you would at a physical signing in the sense that the author is actually signing the book, and there's even more you can, you can play around with it too.
45:25: You can add a custom tip-in sheet so you can be signing, say, the, the title page of the book.
45:32: You just Take an image of the title page, upload it to your signing event, and then when you go to sign, you sign the title page and tell Book Funnel to replace the title page with this signed image, so you can still get that same sort of thing where it's, it's not just you signing a blank page in an ebook, you're actually signing a part of the book, and we're looking to add more, more things in there for it in the, the future as well.
45:56: But I'm, I'm glad that you've adopted it.
45:57: I know I intend to.
45:58: I haven't, I haven't figured it out yet.
46:00: I intend to.
46:02: Well, you have to learn.
46:03: I have to learn in the next couple of weeks.
46:05: Yes, well, well, a suggestion I might have, is if you, you have a group of readers who you already know or like, would they be willing to help you like just learn how to experiment with it.
46:19: You can create a signup page, give that to that select group.
46:22: Maybe they're not reading, whoever it is.
46:24: Maybe even some of those, those folks who are taking your, your master's course, teach, you can start teaching them this, and they're grad students they're good minions and exactly guinea pigs, right?
46:35: Use them as guinea pigs, and then you can see how it works and tinker with it as you go along.
46:40: So that, that would be my suggestion.
46:42: To be honest, the Kickstarter launches on March 3rd or something, but I don't have to have it done on March 3rd.
46:48: I'm not gonna deliver the books until May or June or something like that.
46:51: So I've, I've got time to learn it.
46:53: I just don't want to promise something that's gonna crash and burn, and I won't, you know, I don't want to do that after all.
46:58: Yeah, no, it, it'll, it'll work.
47:00: And if you, if you have trouble, let us know because we can, we can help you figure it out, but it, it is.
47:05: And it may just be, I'm sure it's not just because I've had a long relationship with you guys, but I like when for my Terracognita Kickstarter last year, I had 3 rock albums that were with it that I, I wrote the lyrics for 3 different rock albums that were companions to the book, and I went, hey, let's just, let's just have that as part of the Kickstarter and the digital albums, and we just are we're gonna have books.
47:28: Funnel deliver it.
47:30: Well, rock albums have a lot of bandwidth and the audio files, there, I mean, these are the people with the giant headphones and the marble speakers and everything, and you can't just send them a compressed MP3 file like you would with an audiobook.
47:45: They wanted to have, and so we started sending these files out through book funnel and it kind of melted down your system because it was too big.
47:52: Yeah, and we, and we did it.
47:54: We did it just for that now so that there is a, there's a setting and authors would have to do this by request.
48:00: We don't, we don't get just enough folks, you know, bringing, uploading and distributing music through us just yet, but there's a setting we can turn on that allows that higher quality down long enough that, that you hadn't even done audio.
48:12: In fact, I, I was, I was one of your first audio samples that you did because I had a, I had a, I wrote a book on, on dictation.
48:21: And I used a sample of, here's the chapter that I dictated.
48:25: Here's the file.
48:25: Download it from Book Funnel.
48:27: It was, it was a short file, like, like 10 minutes or something like that, but that was one of the first audio files you ever delivered, right.
48:35: And now we use you to deliver all of our audiobooks.
48:38: I narrate my own audiobooks for.
48:41: See, I narrate all of my Dan Shamble audiobooks because it's all first person.
48:46: He's the, and I'm walking down the street and trying to look for the werewolf who got lost, and, and I, I never dreamed of doing this, but we had like ACX narrators who went out and did it, and I listened to the audios myself to get up to speed to write the next book, and I kept slapping my forehead because these narrators, well, I've got to do it myself.
49:05: And we had one that it was, it was a vampire, vampire gang run by Ma hemoglobin and her boys, and they were knocking over blood banks, so they're blood bank robbers, and it was my hemoglobin, and the narrator called her Mahemoglobin all the way through, and I just went, but it's hemoglobin, that's a real word that everybody knows.
49:25: Anyway, so I redid all of those books and I've narrated every new book since then.
49:31: Excellent, excellent.
49:32: And one thing I should mention, we are planning.
49:34: To add a assigning feature to audiobooks as well in the future, where you would be able to record like a little clip that would go at the beginning, and since you're narrating them, it'll be seamless.
49:47: So like, hi Jack, happy birthday.
49:49: Here's your audio.
49:50: I love that.
49:51: I love that idea, right, right.
49:53: So you could do the, the same thing.
49:54: It's, it's in the works, but you know, once we have it ready, we'll, we'll let you know for sure.
49:59: Might even give you access to test it ahead of time.
50:02: Well, and this, I'm doing a new audiobook for Sleep with the Fishes, and that'll be probably May or June.
50:08: So let's get it figured out by then.
50:09: OK, OK, I'll, I'll put some pressure on, but you know, I'm not, I'm not the head honcho here, but we'll see, we'll see what we can do, right?
50:16: No, yes, she is, she is, she is the one keeping everybody in line, but no, I think the thing that, that ties us all together for me is that you have.
50:24: Done so much of this work yourself.
50:27: You have, you have done the traditional, right?
50:30: I'm a control freak.
50:32: Well, but you, you've been an author in the traditional publishing space.
50:36: You got back your rights, you became a publisher.
50:38: You've done everything in the indie world.
50:41: You're, you're a producer on TV shows and, and a whole, whole bunch of stuff going on there.
50:46: And so I don't, I can't think of anybody who's better.
50:50: A better fit to teach publishing than you.
50:53: I just have to say, in my spare time.
50:58: Well, and, and if that, that only adds to it, right?
51:01: That only adds to it because it's, it's that second nature.
51:04: You've been doing this for so long.
51:05: You are, but you know, this is one of the things that I do for my students like every other week or something like that is I, I do, it's called real world updates.
51:14: It's sort of like a blog and I go, and this is what I'm working on, and this is the story I wrote this morning and I'm plotting out.
51:20: The Dan Chambell book and, and I'm working with the rock band Coheed and Cambria to do a novel based on their first album.
51:26: And I'm editing this new book for Weird Tales and I'm pitching this thing to, and I talk about the Dan Chambell TV show and how, you know, that was 2 years in the making to get to this point.
51:37: And, and I talk about, and this contract is now 7 months late and And like, and last year, just through a confluence of like, it was the movie stuff and I had some contracts delayed.
51:47: I ended up having like, like 7 or 8 months where I didn't get paid for anything.
51:52: And I, I know it was going to get paid.
51:54: It was all coming through.
51:55: But I'm teaching these guys going, you know, this isn't a biweekly paycheck when you're in this world, you have to figure out how to deal with cash flow and everything.
52:04: And project management and I'm so like literally for the Dan Shamblell Kickstarter, which launches next month.
52:10: So it was like in, in December and January, I'm going, all right, I need to launch this Kickstarter in March.
52:17: So that means I need to get the cover art done ahead of time because you need the cover art for the Kickstarter.
52:22: And to do the cover art, that means I need to plot the darn book so that I can figure out what goes on.
52:27: On the cover and I always like to have at least a draft of the novel done before I launch a Kickstarter so that people aren't waiting forever.
52:35: But here's, here's the other planning thing.
52:36: In October, I'm planning my biggest Kickstarter ever.
52:41: It's my saga of Seven Sons, giant epic science fiction series.
52:45: It's 13 volumes long that I got all the rights back and I got all the covers done.
52:49: I got everything.
52:51: And so if 13 book Kickstarter is launching in October, I can't have the Dan Shamble Kickstarter be 2 months before that.
53:00: It's got to be like 6 months away.
53:03: So I had to get the Kickstarter done and so I'm laying all this stuff out for the For the students going like, you got to back this up because you got to do this then and this before that and this before that and it's kind of blowing their minds, but, but it, but you got to do this stuff.
53:18: You, you can't just like, like wing it and pull it out of your butt.
53:22: You gotta, you gotta do it right.
53:24: I think a lot of, a lot of folks who take a shot at Kickstart or maybe do that their first time and realize it is harder than it looks, but yeah, there's, there's so much that goes into that, a lot of moving parts that you have to think about, and, and your, your, your master's course teaches all of that, which I think is phenomenal because there's a lot and in fact, we last year, instead of them just shadowing me, we had, there's a, a big, it's called the Elk River Writers' Workshop, and it's up in, in Montana, I think, and it was.
53:52: It's entirely taught by indigenous instructors, and it's this great life changing workshop for a whole lot of the people way up in the, in the mountains.
54:02: And, and as you might guess in these, in these wonderful times where we're, we're inspiring and funding the arts like crazy, they had all their funding cut and they were going to have to shut down.
54:14: And so our students in this program.
54:17: We contacted the people who run the workshop, they were connected through Western Colorado University, and we got like a book of the best writings from all the people from this workshop, and we got other books by some of the instructors.
54:30: And so the students ran their own Kickstarter and they published these 4 books by the Elk River Writers' Workshop culty and things, and they ran all, all this themselves.
54:40: They ran it and they raised $10,000 which saved this workshop.
54:45: They did it themselves and they came up with just this great uplifting ra ra and of course they learned how to run a Kickstarter because they did it.
54:54: Yeah, wow, no, that's, that's, so I'm proud of this program.
54:57: You might, you might pick up on that a little bit.
54:59: You should be, you should be proud from, from everything I've heard and everything I've seen.
55:03: Absolutely.
55:04: All right, Kevin, thank you for joining us today.
55:07: It's always a pleasure.
55:08: You are always welcome on the podcast whenever you want.
55:12: Just let us spare time.
55:13: Yes, of course.
55:14: Thank you for joining us, for this conversation.
55:18: Anything else you'd like to mention here or I'll just give you a moment to, to plug the program, etc.
55:24: before we go.
55:24: Well, we've talked a lot about my program.
55:26: I'm very proud of it.
55:27: And again, we are open to applicants.
55:29: We, we cut it off at, I think, 15 students.
55:32: So, and we have filled up before, so I hope you'll check it out.
55:36: I think it's really worthwhile and you get Something out of it.
55:39: It's kind of a side plug on that.
55:41: Also, our superstars writing seminar, it's, it's, it was like the first business of writing seminar.
55:47: We've been going for 15 years.
55:50: We just wrapped up and I'm kind of walking on air still.
55:52: I love doing that.
55:53: And, and of course, personally, I hope you guys will check out the landing page for my Kickstarter and get yourself a free funny audiobook and read up more about my Dan Shamblell TV show.
56:04: Yeah, we will include links to all of that in the description of this video.
56:09: So it'll all be there.
56:10: Kevin, again, thank you for joining us today.
56:13: Emma, thank you as always for being my co-host here on the podcast.
56:19: And thank you to you, our viewers.
56:22: If you're watching here on YouTube, make sure you like this video and subscribe to the channel.
56:27: Also, leave a comment with your 1 or 2 or 3 takes.
56:31: Takeaways.
56:31: I'm sure there would be a lot you take away from this conversation.
56:35: So put those in the comments.
56:37: If you're listening to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere else, please follow us there and leave a review.
56:43: It really does help.
56:44: From all of us here at Book Funnel, I wanna thank you for watching and listening, and we will see you all in the next one.
56:50: Thank you for watching.
56:52: Check out these other videos from Book Funnel.
56:54: And don't forget to subscribe to the channel.