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You've heard the book publishing podcasts that give you tips for selling a lot of books and the ones that only interview world-famous authors. Now it's time for a book publishing show that reveals what actually goes on behind the cover.
Hosted by New York Times bestselling author Anna David, Behind the Book Cover features interviews with traditionally published authors, independently published entrepreneurs who have used their books too seven figures to their bottom line to build their businesses and more.
Anna David has had books published by HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster and is the founder of Legacy Launch Pad, a boutique book publishing company trusted by high-income entrepreneurs to build seven-figure authority. In other words, she knows both sides—and is willing to share it all.
Come find out what traditional publishers don't want you to know.
Speaker 1 00:00
Really dive in to so we met, I would say, what 10 years ago? I actually, I think I was like, new I was, I think it was a, you were a little teen years ago. Okay, you were a little new, freshly hat. I was a deer in the headlights, deer in the headlights. And we had a mutual friend, and he's like, You guys will love each other. And we did. We went on a bike ride. I don't remember the bike ride that well, but
Speaker 2 00:26
I'm text, you do well. I remember we went to Larchmont. We went to Larchmont.
00:31
Okay, we biked to Larchmont.
Speaker 2 00:35
Yes, because we'd live down the street from each other, yes,
00:38
when I lived on El Centro,
00:42
yes, yes, okay, okay
Speaker 1 00:43
with Sycamore. Did you live on never lived on Sycamore, regardless. 14 years ago, you guys, it was 14 years ago. We probably went on a bike ride to Larchmont, just kind of far from Sycamore, whatever. Then. So then time passes, and suddenly, in my experience. So it was about a year and a half, two years ago, you pop up with your memoir, and it is and like, I follow you on Instagram, and it is everywhere, and it feels like it's everywhere, really. And I'm so funny,
01:15
and I'm like, you know? And so when
Speaker 2 01:17
that happens, and I should see my face like I'm in a state of shock, okay,
Speaker 1 01:22
but I've already, I did confess, no, but I'm still years you're still reacting for me telling you this, like, but okay, but okay, so and I, and you know how that happens, like, you know, and I just wrote the substance about jealousy, but like you, you, you know, the the narcissism of small differences, we are only jealous. It's Freudian thing. We are only jealous of those who we believe have something that we think we should get that is interesting. It's fascinating because, I mean, I'm not jealous of, I mean, the example I used was JK Rowling, because I'm not like, right, right? You know, I write these 500 word fantasies, but so, but so you come out with this book that's like, about your sobriety and your addiction, and it's all sexy, and I was jealous. And so then
Speaker 2 02:08
it's not very sexy, but, but, but, but it's so I in maybe the way it's presented,
Speaker 1 02:13
in the way it's presented very much. And so I, but I, so what I do to process that is, I don't comment on your Instagram congratulating you. I don't, but then I see you. I speak at a meeting. Oh my god. And I was talking about, that was the day I got my children's book got reviewed, and I reviews were so mean. They were so mean. And so that's what I was sharing about the mean reviews or whatever. And you came up to me, or you shared, and you said, Oh, I get it. And then I confess to you afterwards, I've been so jealous
Speaker 2 02:44
of you and to the listeners at this meeting, because you're open about that,
02:48
yes, yes, we're open about it.
Speaker 2 02:51
I saw her sitting there, and as soon as she opened, as soon as you opened your mouth about what the topic was going to be, I was like, this is exactly what I need to hear. It was exactly what I was struggling with. And pretty much for me, the Compare and the despair, yep. And here you were talking about it, yep, yep. And there couldn't have been a better person talking about it like this is it just,
Speaker 1 03:19
it was powerful. So what? But what happened? So you sold your book. Tell me the story.
Speaker 2 03:25
So, yeah, when you say sold, I mean, makes me laugh. So I'll back up a moment. So I this was a really long book in the making. I never wanted to publish a book. I grew up in a literary family. My father was a poet, yep. And I loved my father. Love writers. I mean, love writing, and I was always writing, but to be a writer, it just looked really lonely, really, really lonely, really broke, right? Just a really hard life, and I feel like I had already lived it. So I'm like, I don't want to relive this. Yeah, yeah. I'm writing all the time. Yeah, right. So what are you gonna do? Yeah? And and when I first got sober, one of the things like, I always knew that I needed to be writing wherever it was, it was going to be in my first love of short stories, yeah, so it just wasn't going to be a book. Yeah. And I was publishing, like, little short stories and unknown literary journals. And, yeah. And then I met my mentor, Jill, Sherry Robinson, who has since passed. She was 80 at the time, okay, New York Times, Best Selling Author, okay, back in the day, How'd you meet her? I met her because I was at a meeting and I had been talking to my sponsor. I'm like, I know I need to put the pen to the paper again, and I don't know what that looks like. And she's like, I want you to start praying, and I want you to just pray. Okay, so I I did. So I did and that. And then I went to a meeting, and I heard this in the same room. I heard you speak that same meeting. Yep, someone walked in and they shared and they said, Oh, I just got in a car accident. At her right. Writers group. And I came up to her and I went, where's the Writers Group? Who cares that you're injured and you broke your leg? Where's that writers group? She said, it's free at the Hollywood Durant library. So I went there, yeah, and it was like this, you know, was a free writers group. It was like, people sleeping on the sidelines, on the sidelines. I mean, it was just, you know, eclectic group of some homeless people and inside a library. Inside the library, okay,
Speaker 1 05:26
so there, there are people that are sleeping, because it's just kind of a place to gather Exactly. It's random. It doesn't look on the surface like it's necessarily your community. But you were there,
Speaker 2 05:36
right? I was like, Okay, I'm gonna go to this Writers Group. Yes, and I know we'll have limited time, but I so who was? Who the facility? The writing teacher. I was looking at her, and I heard her name, and I'm like, Jill, Sherry. Why does that sound familiar? And I remembered I had been living with my sister's roommate, the three of us, yeah, and he had said, you need to write. You need to, this was 20 years earlier. Yeah, you need to meet my, my, uh, my writing, my, my aunt Jill Sherry Robinson, and he's like, she's in London. She lives in London. I'm like, okay, whatever. Yeah, 20 years later in that library. I'm like, Wait, is this the Jill that he was talking about? No, I read a little piece that I had written, and she came up to me and she said, You're coming home with me. And that's how it
Speaker 1 06:25
started. Shut up. And did you say, Oh, my God, your nephew, 20 years ago, told me to meet you. You're coming home with me. What did that mean?
Speaker 2 06:32
It means she was taking me under her wing. I mean, we just immediately clicked. She was very like a whip, a whipper snapper, yeah? And I like that in a in a mentor and a mentor editor, like, take that, take that red pen out. And yeah. Like, she had no mercy that way, right? And I trusted her implicitly, yeah, right. So it was, like it was gold right off, and she had a lifetime grant award, and so she kind of took me under her wing.
07:05
Under what does that mean? A lifetime grant award?
07:09
She's very wealthy.
Speaker 2 07:10
Well, well, it was like something to do with this woman who had a lot of money in London that she was helping write the memoir. And she said, Listen, I'll give you a certain amount every month, as long as you don't charge writers and you take them, wow. Something along those
Speaker 1 07:24
lines. So an unofficial grant, some unofficial grant, yeah, wow. So she for, or maybe it was official, I don't know. We don't know, but, but she, she gave you her time and energy for free,
Speaker 2 07:36
yeah, and it was great too, because she was in the program, and I would call her, I mean, a lot of times we didn't talk about writing. She was big talker, so it was like, Yeah, her stories were elaborate. She grew up in, you know, her father was head of MGM, and she had stories galore, and they went on forever anyway.
Speaker 1 07:56
And so she helped you get this into book shape.
Speaker 2 07:59
She said, You're writing a memoir. And I said, I'm really not. And so we kind of, like, had it out over, yeah, months, but I kept writing, bringing her pages and doing her Writers Group at her home, which was three days a week. So I was living in her like, not living, but, I mean, I was, I was committed
Speaker 1 08:18
three days a week. You were doing workshops with other writers.
Speaker 2 08:21
Yeah, they were like, I mean, they weren't really workshops, because they but we would read and get some feedback.
08:26
That's a workshop. Girl. That's what a workshop is,
Speaker 2 08:29
I know. But it was, you know, I had taken my UCLA Extension and in college, and I was like, this little, you know, it was eclectic.
Speaker 1 08:36
It was like, to Okay, got it, yeah. And so then what happens you you finish it, and did you have an agent? No.
Speaker 2 08:45
So all along, I still wasn't sure if I was writing a memoir. I didn't know what I was I mean, it's not like I didn't know what I was doing, but I just I was writing, and then I was starting to submit. Because I like to submit work as I'm, you know, get that from my dad. It's like he's, my mom would always say, You're He's the king of rejection, right? So I'm like, okay, you know, when I first started submitting, I'm like, I'm gonna get 100 I don't like to call them rejection motivation letters this year, and this was in my 20s, and I got them, and I was so happy. And 30 years later, I still have them.
Speaker 1 09:17
Now they're emails, but they used to be letters. I still have those. I have my very first rejection letter. Framed it on my wall. I was 12 years old, and I submitted to highlights. They sent me a rejection letter. It's very nice. Oh, yeah, highlights. Did you submit to highlights? No, do you know what that is? No, it's like a children's magazine. Okay? Where did you grow up? Canada. That's why you don't know. Okay, and so, so, okay, let's get to the
Speaker 2 09:44
let's get to the meat of it. So I was sending my work out, and this one magazine in long time, magazine called erotic review in London, yeah, responded okay to one of the pieces, and they said we'd love to publish it. And he and I just started talking. Hockey, and I started writing for them for free. And I was just happy to have a platform that was, you know, they had been around since 1990 still are. And I, we really, really clicked. And I he really got my work, and I just would send anyway. It turned out he was an agent, the guy who
Speaker 1 10:18
edits the erotic review, and like the publisher and editor, the publisher and editor. So he says, I'm going to sell this.
Speaker 2 10:24
Well. He's like, I want to see, do you have a draft of the book of are you working on something? You know, it's like, long, it was a really long process. And I said, Actually, I am. And then, like, a year and a half later, I sent him the first draft, okay? And then what happened? He said, This is, he loved it. He's like, this can be a really hard sell, because it's not, it's a little unorthodox written. How so well it's, no, I heard this from a lot of agents, that it's well, one, it's 75 little chapters, which was intentional. I wanted to make it for people who don't necessarily read, and because poetry is like in my background, yes, even though I don't write poetry, it's like they're, I wanted it to be where you could pick up a chapter and they're half a page and read it Okay, and, and I guess just the writing style this is according to him. So he tried to sell it. It was, you know, it was really hard to sell. I got, I got feedback from, you know, but they're just like, we don't know how this is going to land on an English audience. And it was just a really, really
Speaker 1 11:30
English audience. So he submitted it in, in England, yeah, okay. So not here,
Speaker 2 11:34
yeah, okay. Or maybe here. It was hard to communicate. He was, it was long, okay, long. Like, three months pauses before between emails and I was, I was, it was torturous. It was, oh, there was nothing really for the listeners. There was nothing easy about it at all,
Speaker 1 11:54
because you had so much invested in this. Do you think? Did you think you were overly invested because you had this idea like, Oh, my God, my dream coming true when the truth is a book coming out is just another
Speaker 2 12:10
day, yeah, yes and no, because I also thought I never looked at it as being with a big publisher or making money. However, I guess there was a part of me that was like dreaming from this fantasy yeah and, and it just always it felt like so close sometimes Yeah, and that's what I hear, and the silences and the It was heartbreaking. A lot of the time, really heartbreaking. Yeah? So you would write
Speaker 1 12:45
him and be like, what's the status? And three months later, he'd write back and say, I got another pass, yeah. And would you cry? What happened?
Speaker 2 12:54
I mean, part of me wasn't that surprised. I'm like, Okay, well, let's, you know, and I just kept writing other material and, and that was that was helpful to keep working. And then I finally got another agent or and then I was started sending out to small presses and and looking for another agent. And I did get a couple small offers from small presses. And then I was work. I that's just such a long, kind of, in a way, tedious story. But I did end up landing. I finally got the quarry letter right, right? And I was like, Oh, maybe I should mention that I have these people that have already blurbed my book like I wasn't putting I needed. ANNA David, you
Speaker 1 13:38
needed the marketing I needed, and you were leading with all the wrong things. So you already had blurbs from,
Speaker 2 13:43
well, I did it a little unorthodox, like I already had blurbs from John Coetzee, the Nobel Prize, and, you know, Melissa, Broder, Ben Stein, like I had a number of Right,
Speaker 1 13:58
right? And so you, meeting with that, you finally understand it's not about the quality of the writing. They care about the bright shining, yeah. So you suddenly say, I've got these blurbs from Melissa Broder and head sign and blah, blah. And then they say, Great, we want your book.
Speaker 2 14:14
Well, then it gets them to read a little bit, yeah, yeah. And then they would request full manuscripts. And that took a long time, though, yeah, like, I got 100 I got 100 nos, wow, you know. And one thing is, and I'm sure you have this too, is, I'm, I'm persistent, yeah, yeah. Like, I'm like, Okay, this is, you know, like, alcoholically, like, right? I remember my sponsor being like, okay, Hannah, this is your new this is wine now, right? I'm like, I don't care,
14:45
right? I mean, it's a healthy wine, right?
Speaker 2 14:49
Ish, I mean, there's no, you know, it's like, it depends on, I wasn't serene and within myself,
Speaker 1 14:54
right? Right, right? So you weren't approaching it with like, oh, we'll see how it happens. You were like, this is. Going to happen, god damn it, yeah.
Speaker 2 15:01
And then the second round, I was a lot more grounded when I came back to it and and as it would be, then I got requests,
Speaker 1 15:10
yeah, once you were in surrender. And so then, and so then, what did the book
Speaker 2 15:17
do for you? Well, what the book did for me? And I didn't end up. I did get an agent. I got three. I went through three agents. I finally, not, finally didn't do it through an agent, a small press, really, yeah, and why did
15:29
you not? What happened with these three agents?
Speaker 2 15:30
I was done. They were I was like, I just can't query another agent. Go through another agent. The New York agent. Was like, I loved him, but he ended up retiring after 45 years, like three months after we signed right, like these kinds of things
Speaker 1 15:47
did. So yeah, it was just sort of like almost comedy of errors. And finally, you're like,
Speaker 2 15:52
my wife fell I'm signing off, but I really believe in your book.
Speaker 1 15:57
And you're like, I believe that means jack shit, go sell it. So finally, you make a deal yourself. You don't you have a lawyer, look at it, or whatever. You make a deal. Yeah, the book comes out.
Speaker 2 16:07
When did it come out? And I'll tell you, you know what my advance was, and I haven't said this out loud, $500 so you can feel better about me selling my
Speaker 1 16:15
book. Well, I bet you earned royalties, which I never have.
16:19
I've met. I earned some Yeah,
16:22
so the so when did the book come out? It
Speaker 2 16:24
came out in 2022, so next month will be two years, three years.
16:29
And how did it change your life?
Speaker 2 16:33
It you know, there's really something to be said about it being a really long process, because I and my therapist had always said this all along. She's like, it's, you're having an integrated experience. So it was like, I was, by time it came out, I it was an integrated experience. It wasn't the book was not, in my opinion, a big splash I had done so so much work towards it internally, with all of the disappointments and working with the things that came up for me, right, that by the time it came out, I, you know, court, I mean, it was heavily influenced, because my greatest dream at that point was to publish a book. Yeah, my greatest fear my whole life was losing my father, and they happened within months of each other, wow, and I was in hospice with my dad, and I got the publishers edits edit. I needed them to get them back that day, and I couldn't do it, wow. Or I would, I mean, I was like, in, you know, it was in hospice with my father right by his side, right? And so that was really, really, really hard, yeah. And it changed my life by it changed my life in the sense that I think, because I had built such a strong community by the time it came out, and that
18:12
my expectations were,
Speaker 2 18:16
I knew I was not good at public publicity. I had no social platform zero. I wasn't even on Instagram until, like, months before, I was like, I don't what's a story? Like, I mean, I was
Speaker 1 18:27
fooled me. Well, something, it goes guns blazing. Well, something,
Speaker 2 18:33
something ignited the fire. Okay, yeah, my father came out in me. He passed the torch. And I'm like, Oh, I am, yeah. I'm in charge
18:42
of this. Yeah, this. Like,
Speaker 2 18:44
let's do like, we got to do this. And I didn't know I had that in myself. And I heard all along, just like in other parts of my sobriety, that you will never you don't know what's going to come along the way. Yeah, and the connections that I made that were already authentic before the book came out. It was, I don't want to say yes, I do want to say, things started to line up, and one thing led to the other. And, you know, I'm not good at pitching. I realized I'm not going to pitch podcasts. And it it all kind of, it was like I was, I was having those relationships and, like, with you, inviting me on. So everything's been like that, right? Everything, right? And as you know, like it's gotten, I've I've been fortunate, and I've also invested the time, like I went to it not was to get something out back, but I would go to a lot of readings over the years. I was in a lot of conversations. I was in the community, yeah on the sidelines, yeah on the sidelines, I mean, but I was, I was there and, and, and really, you know,
19:57
had a lot of struggles, a lot of struggles.
Speaker 1 20:00
So when you say so you'd built up relationships, sort of, you know, because to me, it's this is like, what I remember is, like, you're on dopey, then you have a thing published in the New York Times, like this. Like, I always had a resentment, not, not, don't Dave, like, whatever. I could never get a full episode. They put me on, like, hat. He put me on half an episode. And I didn't
Speaker 2 20:18
even know what dopey was. So that was good. I was happened. I not happened. I was in New York doing the book launch, or one part of it. And then he's like, and I just, I was like, I had one day left. It was like, that was there for three days. And I'm like, I, you know, I might have my huge suitcase. I'm on subway. I'm like, where are you? What is dopey, you know? So he
20:37
just reached out and said, Will you come on? So
Speaker 2 20:40
another writer, Amy, yeah, she had where Aaron Carr had made the connection. She's like, you should meet this writer, Hannah, yeah, yeah. Like, I said it was all through word of
Speaker 1 20:50
relationships, yeah, and so and so, um, you were saying that. You didn't you were telling before we were recording. You were like, I don't want to go through this again. Yeah. What he was, So, what does that mean? What's, you know, in terms of doing another book?
Speaker 2 21:04
Yeah, well, I have, you know, I have a couple manuscripts sitting there, and even the agents, like, when you're done that one, you know, this is, this is the commercial one. This can sell. And I'm like, I and I want, not want, I don't want to have a repeat of the same experience. I want a new experience. So what does that look like, right? So I've written these books to go back in and edit them again and to look for an agent. The process of looking for an agent, just like I, you know, and even you know, my writing partner of eight years, she's and she's her books done, you know, she has on her third book that she sold for a lot of money. She's completely in a different bracket than me. Who's your writing partner? This writer, Christina MacDowell, that, I mean, but she self published that one. But her other books?
Speaker 1 21:56
Oh, yeah, she the one who had a piece go viral. Yes about her, yes, yes. I met her a long time ago.
22:06
Yeah, yeah. So we connected years ago.
Speaker 1 22:08
And so you're writing partners in in scripts or
Speaker 2 22:12
no, just like in a writers group, like, we have three of us, and we've been
Speaker 1 22:15
together forever. Oh, so, so more like a Yeah, like a workshop, yeah. Except there's two people. There's two people. You just said there were three of you. Well, three, yeah, right, three, two other people, two other people, and you meet on Zoom, yeah, because we've all moved.
Speaker 2 22:29
They moved. She moved to DC to do a book. The other one moved to New
Speaker 1 22:32
York. I have the same thing. I have a group of three of us, and we meet on Zoom once a week, and we write. That's what we do. I Well, we have, I love that. Yeah, I love it, too. It's just because I was not working on a new novel, and I really wanted to, and I and I knew that if I just didn't set the time aside. So that's when I started. And I have so many questions for you, okay, but we're not, and I'm happy to answer them, but not right now. So So you're like, This is too exhausting. I don't want to go through this again. I want to have a new experience. What's your new experience going to be? Well, I'm
Speaker 2 23:03
not sure. I mean, so I, you know, had sent this current collection to a to an editor. I got some positive feedback, also feedback with the structure and needing to do things that are, are like, you know, have a transformation in the book. And I'm I find that really challenging and structure is really like, I've structure, and those kinds of things are not my strong point. I don't think,
Speaker 1 23:29
or maybe you just don't think it works. I mean, yeah, is it? Is it that it's not is it that you're weak, or they could be wrong?
Speaker 2 23:36
That's true. I don't know. I thank you. That's yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1 23:41
to me, what you described is you did a book that didn't follow the typical structure, and it worked. So what the fuck do they know?
Speaker 2 23:47
And it's interesting, because that was the question that you had written about. Like, well, what is working out in one of your pieces, right? Like, yeah, what is, what's, what is a successful book? Yes, and that's the question, right, yes, okay, was your book successful? It depends where I am at inside
24:05
myself. Tell me,
Speaker 1 24:06
so what's the best possible, like, if you're at the height of, like, feeling, feeling yourself, and I see when I go, would your book do for you? What's that? What's that?
Speaker 2 24:16
Answer, it did everything. And it wasn't because of the book being published, it was everything that led up to it, everything that's happened in the last three years, the whole process of writing it, and the process of of putting it out there in the world, myself, right? And showing up for it show. How do you show up for something your dream when your father's dying, right or has died, how do you show up for both and honor, both Right,
24:49
right? And so the
Speaker 2 24:53
showing up for that whole process and staying the course with it, right? One of the things that has. Helped me the the most. And again, I have also I recognize, is recognizing how fortunate I've been. And that doesn't mean I don't suffer from compare and despair, because there's always going to be something else. And I see that in myself. I'm like, I mean, it is like, Okay, I did this now this, and it doesn't fill the hole, right? Nothing. And I have, like, success, like yourself, successful friends, right? New York Times and, and I've heard before it doesn't fix the hole. And I'm like, I don't care,
25:32
right? I want it anyway. I want it anyway.
25:35
So who do you have writers you're jealous of? It's
Speaker 2 25:38
kind of like this, this kind of, like, big watch. I mean, I have to say, like, I think, because I wasn't with a big five and I it's like, my, my, my journey has been, it has been when I Yes, like, yeah. I mean, just people that I don't even know, right?
Speaker 1 25:59
So what people you don't know, but you don't think they're very good.
Speaker 2 26:03
Oh, that. I don't think they're very good. I don't know because I haven't read their work. I just
Speaker 1 26:06
read the work of the people. I'm jealous. I realize they're okay,
Speaker 2 26:11
right? I'm like, you know, there's a lot to read. I'm like, how many authors can I read? I you know, and I also just see how much else it takes. So I think it kind of puts it in perspective where I'm like, I'm not going to do another proposal, yeah? Like, I see what that takes, like my and I see what it takes with my writers. Part my writing partner, Christina, she's in a completely different world than I am. Yeah, we're completely different writers, yeah? And so kind of really honoring my own path really helps. And also seeing like, Oh, wow. Like, you mean, I have this box full of gifts that have been given to me and that keep, like being like talking with you, and I want more like, I feel like, right? You know, I feel like it's slapping everything, all the gifts that have happened in the face and be like, this isn't enough, right? I need more, and the more is never enough,
Speaker 1 27:10
right? Right? I remember because I was always so bitter for all these years, like, Why didn't my book do better? It deserved to do better.
27:18
I'm like everything,
Speaker 1 27:19
but then I'm like, what it did? I mean, it didn't sell. Well, none of my books have want the one, and also, well, what is well, what is well? But then it occurred to me, what if I've gotten more than I deserve. Like, what if? What if it doesn't that? It doesn't go that way normally, okay,
Speaker 2 27:36
but in my eyes, I was so intimidated by you. I love you. Told me that I loved that, and I'm like, and also it was like you were just in another whole category. So it was like I wasn't even dreaming about publishing a book when I met you, right? It was like, I was
Speaker 1 27:52
like, you thought of you as, I mean, because you told me about your dad, and, like, right, this association of third it just
27:58
seems so like, over here where
Speaker 2 28:00
it was like, you know, and that's John's like, you need to meet Anna David. She writes for magazines and stuff, and I'm like magazines. I do literary journals that are underground, that no one's heard of, and no one
Speaker 1 28:11
reads Right, right? Well, now the magazines are gone, and the erotic review guys still there. But, okay, but, but, okay. We have to wrap up. But I need to really just delve quickly into your sub stack. So about as we're recording maybe a month ago, you decide I'm going to do a sub stack, yeah, and I'm going to make it about, sort of you describe it,
Speaker 2 28:32
yeah, well, a few years ago, had, I had had, I hadn't had sex in a long time, and I went through this summer where I was like, Okay, I need to have sex again, the short of it. And so you went, it's not this summer. This is old, yeah, I thought this was happening in real time. I made it that way. So it sounded like I'm completely
Speaker 1 28:52
on the edge of my seat thinking you got you don't even want to know what I think you went up to last night. Okay, so this is old. This was a summer
Speaker 2 28:59
ago, a couple summers ago, a couple summers ago, yeah,
Speaker 1 29:03
I feel cheated. So you're not actively having crazy sex right now, not right
Speaker 2 29:07
now. However, these are real this is in real time, as I experienced it.
Speaker 1 29:13
In real time, got it, got it. And it's called Summer of men. Called Summer of men, about sex after 50. We happen to be recording this at the end of summer. So what happens now for the readers who are not aware of the fact that
Speaker 2 29:24
it's not, well, it's really still just getting started. It's gonna continue. Okay, so, but you're gonna have changed the name, no, okay. It's just gonna be what I want it to be. She's just gonna do it how she wants to do it. And that's and that's the thing with the sub stack. It was just an experiment. I'm like, I have all this I want it to be. I want substack to be my accountability
Speaker 1 29:42
partner. That's how I'm using it. Yeah, I love it. And people have
Speaker 2 29:46
been telling me to do one for a few years. And I'm like, No, I don't want to,
Speaker 1 29:49
but this will be a book. Don't you think this could be a book? No, I don't pony up to pay much. And I'll be honest, I was like, because I did the sponsor thing, but I was like, I don't know if I'm gonna pay Oh, and. I was like, I gotta know what happens. Oh, my god, is that what made you you got my $50 I needed to know what happened. Wait, that is so great, because
Speaker 2 30:07
it was my writing partners. Like, you have to charge them. Like, I don't want to charge people. Just, and she's like, just, you know, it's fine. Like, just do a month, yeah. And you were like, one of the first people that I saw. I'm like, what the wait? And you thought I I hit the wrong, hit the wrong button. I'm like, what
30:23
I was trying to click? Don't
Speaker 2 30:24
charge. I only started a paywall for some of them recently. I'm just like, let me experiment.
Speaker 1 30:29
I can't, I can't I There it is so good. I'm not blowing smoke.
Speaker 2 30:33
Well, I am wearing i Before coming here, I worked, like, two and not two hours on the next piece. I mean, I kind of like, I'll take the journal entries. I'm like, How can I Oh, so these were already written, yeah. And now I'm making it like I have, I have 68,000 words of summer of men, and I'm taking from there. Like, how can I pull from this? Not bore you,
Speaker 1 30:56
not boring me, you know, or making me feel like I have a very boring sex life.
31:00
Well, I have one too. I mean, we'll talk after you.
Speaker 1 31:03
So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. If people want to find out more about you, they need to subscribe to summer of men. But what else you have a website? I have a website. You're on the Instagram. I'm on the
31:15
Instagram. My book's called strip and memoir and
Speaker 2 31:19
yeah, and Anna, I just, I'm so I'm so honored, like, if someone had told me this, I know it's one of those corny things, but seriously, if someone had told me this 14 years ago, I'm like, What are you talking about? And to be honest, I've not been doing podcasts lately. I'm like, although I did one in a hotel room the other day on sex.
Speaker 1 31:38
Oh, that sex podcast that sounds sexier than this, but I'm
Speaker 2 31:42
a younger man in a hotel room, like two days ago. I'm like, You know what? I'll do it.
Speaker 1 31:46
Yeah, you ain't the very first person I reached out to. That is the truth. So with that, I'll see y'all next week.
31:54
Yay. Okay, you are so easy to talk to. You.