S E755: Dick Wybrow on Reframing Your Limitations as Creative Superpowers

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And I'll say honestly, if I had 500,000 people buy my book or a million people buy my book, I would rather 500,000 people buy my book and really love it.

Yeah.

Rather than my marketing was so good, I get a million people to buy it and it wasn't quite as good and they just, it was kind of a bit of a throwaway. Now, having my books sort of matter to people or having the books sort of like influence people. I, there are people that tell me that they quote lines from Tame all the time. They're running jokes and families. Yeah, that's the world to me. So I would rather have, like I said, half the sales, but have it have more meat and more merit.

Step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders To success. I always love it when I have a return guest, somebody who I have not only had as a guest but also been a fan of. And Dick Weybrauch, you are that person. Our last episode released— I have it pulled up here— August 9th, 2024. So we will link it in the show notes for anybody who wants to hear a little bit more about your story and your journey. But today we're going to dive into, of course, career pivots, who you are. For a reminder for the audience who doesn't know you, you spent two decades as a stand-up comedian, radio host, TV producer, lots of broadcast media, then you walked away to become a full-time author. Dick Weibrow, you are the founder of D Dub Publishing, author of multiple bestselling series including the Hell Ink and Wolfwear collections, collections I've been a fan of. You blend supernatural thriller stories with a lot of humor. Humor, and this has continued to capture loyal readers across genres. But you're also, you know, a masterclass story and reinvention, overcoming imposter syndrome and building a sustainable creative business from the ground up, now helping people as a sherpa, people who want to be independent writers and want that guide. And you also have a brand new sci-fi heist comedy releasing in August. So you are proof that genre expansion and risk-taking are the heartbeat of staying relevant. So Dick, welcome back to Your Brand Amplified. I'm of course thrilled to have you back.

It's always lovely to speak with you. And, and that is an amazing intro. I may just take all of that. I can send it to you. And put that, I, I would take that and clip that, put that as my alarm every morning to wake up to that, go, ah, I've done pretty good.

You have.

I've been pretty good.

And I paraphrased some of that.

So no, that was great. That was great. And then I am excited about this too, because we talked ahead of time and this isn't anything just to be clear, because I know a lot of people selling courses. I'm not selling any courses. I'm an author. I can't do courses. I don't have the brain capacity to put something like that together. But we talked about this idea about how many people now with some of the success you were talking about, but how many people now, the newbie sort of authors that come up to me and they say like, how can I do that? I've always wanted to write a book.. And so I have actually put together, uh, 4 or 5 tips for those listeners who are listening like, I have always wanted to write a book and I haven't done it. So this is gonna be your inspiration. That's why you're tuned into this right now, because this is gonna be your inspiration to finally write that book you've wanted to write, and I'll help you get there. We'll do that later on.

Yes, we will absolutely do that later on because every single person listening should have a book. So we're gonna be talking a lot about that, and I actually, This is teeing up perfectly because I'm working with a client right now who is finishing a book.

Oh, great.

And I think, I suspect you may be the right person to work with her based on what I know about you.

Finishing the book is the hardest part. It's definitely the hardest part.

Well, let's go back a little bit. Well, you had this incredible career in the US. You now live in beautiful New Zealand where your wife is from, and your wife supported the transition. And you also just mentioned that you were able to retire her. Which frankly is something that I'm hoping to do with my partner. He's a filmmaker and an editor. I want to retire him to come just work on my projects with me selfishly.

Oh, that'd be great. Right. See, my wife and I don't work together, but when the book started working, because the thing is, as an author, you spend a lot of time alone in this room, which means you spend a lot of time away from the people you care about, the people you love. And so, and I have to, and you got to keep that in mind. As a writer, because sometimes you can get a little bit wrapped up in your own thing and not remember that there's somebody on the outside of that door that kind of wants to be on the inside of the door. So yeah, it was about, about a year ago or so where my wife came to me and said, uh, yeah, I don't want to work.

Yeah.

So she's a Texas girl, so she puts it out straight to me and I love that. And so she saw the success of what was happening and I'm not, it's not glowing. It's still a lot of work and I'm still trying to put things together, but it was enough here in Christchurch where we live that we could say, you know what, if we just kind of, we take a look at our bills and we, our life could be a bit better because we're both sliding up to 60 about now. And that's when you start to reevaluate and say, listen, I could work my butt off for the next couple of years, or can we rearrange our finances in some way to make, help us enjoy the years we do have? And so that's what we're trying to do right now, which means I've gotta work a little bit harder, but she's enjoying it. So that's great. Yeah.

Yeah. One, and the beautiful thing is, you don't have to be in any one location, right?

That's fascinating too, a, as an author, because there's a guy that I, I barely knew and he said he was going outta town. But I just met him. It was crazy. I just met him like a, like a couple weeks earlier, but we sat down for a coffee and we sat there for like 3 hours chatting and he just randomly said, hey, listen, I'm gonna head down to Dunedin, which is at the very sort of far south of where I'm in the South Island. He said, I'm gonna be there for a week by myself. Uh, you wanna go? And I went, uh, okay.

Yeah.

How crazy, because I could pick up and I can just go to coffee shops while he was out doing his work. He was working at calibrating some machines at various garages and things. And, but the entire time I got to take a look at, we went to Wanaka, we went to Queenstown, we went to Invercargill, all these various places. And I know every coffee shop I think in the South South Island right now. But yeah, no, it's been, it's great. It's an unusual lifestyle, but it, uh, I wouldn't trade it for the world.

Well, and it's, I think the things that have changed for me since we last had multiple conversations are I have Thai citizenship now, so I'm a dual citizen.

Oh, fantastic.

Yeah. So that's one thing I'm looking at is although I'm teaching a lot in person now and online still, but it would be wonderful to go live in Thailand for a few months and to teach my online classes at USC in the morning. In Thailand in the evening before, right, in the US, and then have the day free to work on my podcast or to just to relax. I think more of us are looking at how do we have a really great lifestyle where we're still be able to do the things that we love, but, and also pour into the people that we love.

I wonder if, you know, for all the negative things that COVID did, maybe that helped us get our heads straight on that. I don't really know, but I think that there definitely would have been a time where we would've been at the place we're right now and are, because you have that drive, you've got that feeling like I need to make more money, I need to work harder, this sort of thing. And the idea of actually making less money when we weren't 100% ready for that would've been horrifying, the very thought of that. But then it's like, you know what? No, let's enjoy what we've got right now. Let's enjoy the time we have and we can make it work. And I love the idea that you're taking a look at going over to Thailand. That'd be pretty amazing. Get out there and experience it.

Exactly. So we, we've talked again about some of these topics before, so I'm not going to go over everything. I really want people to go back, listen to that other podcast interview we did to give them a little bit more of your background. But I do wanna touch on a couple things. Thinking about going back to, right, being a comedian, being a broadcaster, you knew how to get laughs. You then had to learn how to translate the humor into the page. You were very confident in several industries that, and then you all of a sudden shifted. So can you talk to us a little bit about those things? Like you're really confident in one field. You're perhaps having to humble yourself and start over, and you're also having to figure out how you transfer these skills that you already have.

Right.

I think similarly, and you mentioned a part of it, you do have to humble yourself. So, like I was talking to somebody about, they have an interest in, in this idea of tablescaping, this idea of going and crafting these sort of beautiful scenes and making beautiful tables. And they asked me, like, how did you do what you did? And I said, go ask people who do it. And I know it feels like something that, oh, I can't do that. They're really busy. Most people that do that thing they do, and if it's a bit of a creative or if it's their passion, they're happy to talk about it. And most are happy to— that I have found, most are happy to share that experience. And so having a mentor, or having even whatever age it might be— I had mentors that were 20 years younger than me when I first started doing some of this. So having a mentor that kind of you could ask questions of and then frame what they tell you to make sure it fits what you do, and then just become a student of it. Writing was something I have wanted to do, this full-time job, since I was 16 or 17 years old. So my— I was all in on this. But it does, in my case, and hopefully people can take what I'm saying here and apply to what they're going through, is I had to really understand the craft. Because the craft of going up and telling jokes on stage, or even writing jokes on television— because I actually wrote, I helped produce one of the very first CNN TV comedy newscast with a guy named Pete Dominick, right? So that kind of writing is very different than writing in a book. And there's different forms of that writing within a book. And it's, you know, I, I won't get all, all of it, but there's an idea about pacing and there's an idea about what's a joke and what's sort of a setup in a funny scene. They're all very different types of writing and understanding running and walking and then the structure. The very structure of sentences. And if you're writing something as more of a joke, that you make sure that that punch word ends at the very end of the sentence, all those bits and pieces. So it is really becoming a student and going like, it's okay for me not to know this. Because a lot of times we have to give ourselves permissions to be stupid. And I was very happy to say, I'm a little stupid on this. I got this, this, and this. I'm pretty sure I can work this out. And so I took a look. I had, like I mentioned, I had mentors I could go to. I could ask questions of. But then my case, I then also read a lot of humorous science fiction or humorous fantasy. And then you would stop down, you go, why was that funny? Why did that moment work? Don't just read and go tee-hee, but stop and go, what was the structure behind that? Oh, wait a minute. They'd set this up earlier so they didn't pollute all this with more noise. This ended up being a back and forth and back and forth. And then there was one, I just read stuff from Joe Abercrombie. He wrote this book called The Devils, and he used the structure so, so well. Like to where like somebody will repeat the line and you know it's coming, but then it becomes even funnier because you know they're gonna say it again cuz they got nothing. And, and so that repetition became funny and that's something that I've started to incorporate in some of my own writing. So I'm always learning about it. So to learn my craft, I've gotta go, I go to other people and see what they're doing and take a look at, uh, a bit of the magic they've got so I can hope to glean a little bit of it.

Yeah. So it's like any skill building, you actually have to, to You have to put the work in.

100%.

Yeah.

It's, and when it's your passion, you sort of enjoy it. And that's the best part of it. That's your driving force. Because for me, it's gonna be, I always call it the head and the hand. The hand is sort of the hard work of it, and the head is just getting your mind into the game. And, and the hand will go if the head's ready to go. And so for me, my passion is the writing, crafting, creating. There's, there's nothing so great as somebody coming back and I just had a note the other day of somebody saying like, You just made my entire week brighter with this book. That's the greatest thing on the planet. There's no check you could write that would be worth that to me. The idea of I made someone's life for a brief period of time a little bit better, and I love that.

Yeah, that is truly the best thing. I think it's, that really should be a big motivator. Obviously we need to make money to live and all that stuff, but knowing that we actually change people's lives, we brought a little lightness into their day. We brought some knowledge, whatever the case may be.

That's right.

Yeah. And you have D Dub Publishing. You went indie, right? Instead of going traditional. So remind us, was that financial choice, a creative choice, a little bit of both?

Yeah, it was both. I mean, I was in the television industry at, you know, some of the highest— that's awful to say it that way. But, you know, I was— when I was at CNN, I mean, it kind of doesn't get any higher than that broadcast news. And I was in those meetings where there's a big round table and the doors are locked. So I've seen sort of like the publishing side or the creative side be destroyed by large B. Behemoth boardrooms. And so the experience that I have had, and I, there was a time when I had like a Beverly Hills agent and I had a book that had been optioned for a movie and that process, I don't know if I spoke about it last time, but that was pretty crushing. And so to then take the reins and do all of that myself was for somebody like me who was a bit of a workaholic and very passionate about this, that worked perfectly because there are authors, there's plenty of authors. If you listen to them, it's kind of confronting. I know many authors. Who have deals with various publishing houses, they have to pitch their book. Like, I've got a very good friend, New York Times bestselling author, and every time he writes a book or every time he comes up with an idea, he's gotta go to his publisher and say, hey, I wanna write this. Is that okay? And that's fine. I'm not making fun of that. That works for him, right?

Yeah.

It doesn't work for me. Because the stories I come up with, publishers would go, no, that's, why would you do that? That's, that's strange. But it works for me. And so, yeah, I, I like that freedom. It's a lot more work potentially because I do a lot of marketing. I do ads, I do social media and all that sort of thing. Maybe I wouldn't have to do that if I was going the traditional publisher route. So it's a trade-off, but I like this and it fits my workaholic lifestyle.

And do you do it all yourself? Do you have team? No, you do it all yourself.

Uh, I do most of it all myself. There are bits and pieces that I do have people that get involved with. I have like cover designers. I've got people that, uh, I've got a lovely woman who does my editing, my proofreading. But, you know, when it comes to the marketing side, I do almost all of that myself. I do all the ads myself, the writing I do myself. But I do have, like I said, I have friends, I have people that I associate with in the industry that I can get to like find out what's working with you, what's, you know, can you take a look at this, tell me if you like this, that sort of thing. You do need a bit of a crew around you, you know, but not 24/7. And so yes, most of it I do myself, but I would say there's probably 10% of this I definitely I definitely rely on those around me.

Well, and let's talk a little bit about that a little bit further because there are obviously a lot of people out there who will publish a book nowadays, and that can mean a number of different things, right? It can be very costly to hire somebody, even if you finish the book, to go through the process with you to get it to Amazon bestseller or whatever kind of bestseller status. And, uh, there's a lot of intricacy. So can you talk a little bit about the difference in control, revenue, creative freedom between indie and traditional? I mean, you mentioned a little bit of it with your friend, But I'd love to dig into that even more.

Well, part of it is about the release schedule, and I apologize if it gets— if this is getting kind of granular, but maybe you want that. So like with Indies, I can publish a book— like I just published a book last week, and then I published another book in January. I'm gonna publish this FastlyCon, this new book, publishing this, uh, coming up here on the 20th of August. And so that's a pretty fast release schedule. Traditional publishing, doesn't like doing that. So, that Joe Abercrombie I mentioned, he wrote The Devils, I think, earlier this year. I don't even know when that sequel's coming out. Yeah. So James S. A. Corey has a book, Mercy of the Gods, and then he had a follow-up, they had a follow-up, because it's actually two people under the same name, and maybe their next sequel comes out next year. I don't do that kind of schedule. Now, the other part of it too is, yes, they've got the marketing machine and everything so they can drive those book sales. That's why those books cost $14.99. My books will cost $2.99 to $4.99 or $5.99. But because I'm an independent, rather than making— somebody might make— an author might make a dollar off that $14.99, I make 70%. So if I sell a book for $5, then I'm making $3.50 essentially on every book. And so, yeah, so there's a payoff there. There's definitely a payoff and it's worth doing it because I'm allowed to control my schedule. I can control the stories I want to write, and then the payoff is much higher. It is more work, and you are taking a bit of a shot in the dark, but the payoffs, I feel, are much, much higher as independent. Get that Amex Gold Card ready. I'm way too tired to cook tonight.

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Yeah. Do you think that the genre matters? Because you obviously write sci-fi, you write fiction, but what if somebody's writing a memoir or some other kind of book? Do you think that this model still works really well with that?

Memoir can be kind of tough because, you know, we've seen a lot of the memoir, and I can't really speak expertly about that. I do know that memoir can be a little tough. And it also depends on why you're doing it. Are you writing a memoir to make a million dollars? Well, that's probably not going to happen. But are you writing a memoir because you want to tell your story and there might be some people that could benefit from it? That's just as valuable as a million dollars. Maybe not in the bank account, but there's a lot of value to that because you share your story and it might help somebody else. How great would that be? But yeah, it could be a lot of different reasons you want to put those together. If you're a romance writer, especially right now, fantasy romance, Romantasy is still really popular. So I guess some of those people that are writing that are doing really well and there's a lot of appetite for that. And most of the romancy right now is actually independent authors, but it is a pretty crowded field. So, and the stuff that I do is, and it's actually kind of funny because I actually write fantasy humor and because there's so much romance, I have a lot of romance readers reading my books, which actually affected the course of my series in a way, because I, I finished it book 5 here. This is done. This is the Cain series that, uh, I can't do it. There you go. Cain series that you and I spoke about last time. I wrote 5 books and the whole idea of the book was that Cain, you know, he's this wolf that got bitten by a man and turned into a 6 foot 7 French Canadian. And then in the full moon, he turns into a werewolf and the partial moons, he turns into a dog. Amelda comes by, this woman, she's an ex-criminal, she helps him out, and their goal is to cure his humanness so he can go back to his pack, back to his family. Okay, great. 5 books. That's the arc. That's what happened. And a bunch of readers went, that was really good, but you're not done. What? It's like, Amelda needs to be with Cain. And it's like, what? Well, that wasn't the story arc. No, no. Imelda needs to be with Cain, and they were adamant. And so I wrote books 6, 7, and 8, and I'm glad, I'm glad they insisted that. So, because it ended up being really a lot of fun, that, that second part of that series was really great. So it's kind of like a choose your own adventure in that case. You argue 1 through 5 and end on that if you like it that way. If you want the slightly more romantic side, although not heavily romance, read to the very end. But yeah, you have to find what works for you. And you mentioned genre. Don't chase genres. If you're thinking of becoming an independent author, do not chase a genre because by the time you write that book, edit that book, and get that book out, God forbid you go to a traditional publisher because it's gonna be 3 years from now, that genre is gone. It's all— so find something that you really like to do. Like one of the— I wrote two-thirds of a trilogy. And it was thriller. They were thriller books because I was writing to the market. But I never wrote the third book because I just didn't have the passion for it. But yeah, so, so don't chase, don't chase the hottest genre right now because you won't get there in time. Find that thing, like I'm writing what suits me, fantasy and science fiction, which are kind of similar umbrellas under the same umbrella. But the humor side of it is the sort of the big sort of differentiator, the big sell for me. Yeah.

Well, and now sometimes I read things and I'm like, was this actually written with AI? Right? Because I'm like, this, this seems to have a lot of, and now I've seen authors put disclaimers. I did not write this with AI. This is all my original thought. And I'm even seeing that in, if I'm working with a client writing, giving them a research paper or, you know, a brief on something, I now realize I need to add those disclaimers too, because I might have AI help format. But it's, I'm not going to have it to the original thought. So I think that's one thing. We also see micro dramas and they're not just the, these mini films, but they're also these mini chapter book series that you get swept into because they appear on your feed on social media. And then they want you to down— they give you a few chapters and they want you to download some app where they're gonna charge you $60 to finish a book that you would normally maybe use Kindle for, or just buy outright for a lot less, knowing that the money's going directly to the author. So I, I feel like even since we last spoke, there are all these different things coming out and they're crowding the market more. They're making it even more confusing for authors to know which way to go.

This is one of the biggest advantages, like we were talking before about finding your thing, your voice, because AI, I'll make a bold statement. AI is not gonna be a bigger problem as everybody wants to make it out to be because yes, it is flooding the market and yes, and Amazon and other people are doing things because there's Tens of thousands of books being published by AI every single day that Amazon and others are trying to get rid of. The thing is, is those are kind of one-time purchases and those will bloat things up a bit until we get filtered those out. But that's not gonna take that much air away from you. If you build a following, like I'm slowly building a readership. I have people that read the books that I put out, so I'm not competing with AI in that sense. It is slightly more difficult as a new author, but it's, but it's the same path. Find the thing you love to write. Find the thing you're most passionate about. And that little niche there is gonna excite other people who are really into that stuff. Do you like writing about warplanes in the 1960s? Well, write that, do that. And then just keep on that and keep writing about that cuz that's your passion. You will find those other people that love that too. So that's one way of kind of defending yourself against sort of this AI bloat that we have when it comes to being an author. But the biggest advantage I have as an author, because you'll get accused of it no matter what, everybody will, because I've got a pretty fast release schedule. I'm going to write 3 or 4 books this year and instantly somebody will say, oh, it's AI. It's like, well, take a look. I did 3 or 4 books for the past, I don't know, 4 years or so. But the advantage that I have unusually so is that I'm a humor author and AI, AI ain't funny.

Yeah.

And so there's no way that you could say, oh, that was written by AI. I said, do you find it funny? You think it's funny? Now, not all the stuff I write is funny. I make attempts, but yeah, and the biggest advantage that I have is AI cannot do humor. I think in part because there's no programmer that can describe what humor is to AI, and it can't seem to infer what it might be. 'Cause to me, humor is like this voodoo. It's this amazing cultural voodoo that nobody can quite describe. And it's been my advantage over AI and oh, I think will be to the end because I don't think anybody can properly define humor.

Right.

Yeah, that's such a good point. But talk about the audience growth aspect. How did you find those first dedicated fans? Was it through advertising? Was it that they discovered you on— again, discoverability. People are saying, wanting the authenticity, going back to our conversation just that we had just a few seconds ago, right? They want authentic writers. They want to be able to connect with authors that they love. I know that Facebook groups, Reddit is a huge thing. Now for that. So how did you crack that code to find those really dedicated people?

Yeah, you've got to— a lot of— again, I'm speaking from the author's side, and hopefully it relates to other businesses as well, but there's plenty of other— plenty of authors who go like, oh, I don't like putting my face on camera, I don't like talking about— do it anyhow, you know. For as much as me, me here talking like you, like this, I spend 10 hours a day in this room, I don't talk to anybody, and I'm happy with that. But put your face out there. If this matters to you, you got to put your face out there. It's okay if you look a little bit goofy. In fact, looking a little bit goofy, like you said, that's kind of authentic. That's fine. I have stuff when I was first talking about one of my first series, Hell Inc., that's in there, and it's just chaos. I'm just in there splashing around. But you know, you get 200 views on a video. Whoa, what a failure. But you know what? That's not a failure because out of those 200 views, one of those people might go, hey, I kind of That's kind of interesting. I kind of like that. And that person becomes a reader. I have readers, I got a guy named Neil and I've got Michael. I've had readers since like 2019 that have hung with me the entire time. And if you service those readers, like every single email I get, I respond to every comment on a Facebook post or a Facebook ad. I respond to every single one of those. I carve out time on my day because those people are valuable to me. Sincerely, they make my business. And so I respond to them and showing people that they're valuable and showing people that their interest in you has this other positive return. They can become your biggest advocates. And I have people that say all the time, I tell all my friends about it. I tell all my family about your books. I love them. That's the greatest, absolutely the greatest sort of advertising you could ever have. Word of mouth. I could put out all the ads in the world. I can do all the videos I want, but if this person tells their friends, their friends are gonna probably go check that book out. And so winning those people over takes time. That's the other thing I think when people first start writing is they all wanna be a bestseller, uh, next week. It takes time. It just takes— give yourself permission to kind of fail for a while, or even just go really, really slow. And I'm still building my business as well. I'm still building my readership and I get more and more readers every day. So hopefully 10 years from now that it's gonna be big enough to where I put something out, it's an instant bestseller. How nice would that be? But yeah, it takes time. It takes time.

Yeah. I, I think, I mean, I'm just thinking through my podcast when you're saying this and, you know, it took 3 years for me to realize it was actually a business and was doing really much better than I had ever thought. I don't ever anticipate me being on a certain echelon of people who are already celebrities and stars, and I don't wanna be there. Right. But I still want to grow. It doesn't matter what, where I'm at in the ecosystem and that I am doing well and that I have a dedicated audience, I still always want to get better at what I'm doing. I want to be a better interviewer. I want to make sure I'm trying out new techniques and that I am responding to people and engaging, and it's not just a one-way, you know, show.

And you've got a beautiful show. I love the stuff you talk about. I really do. I think your topics really matter to people, and you obviously have a lot of compassion for the people you speak to and your listenership. And the thing is, that's the other side of this too. What's the win? And I'll say honestly, if I had 500,000 people buy my book or a million people buy my book, I would rather 500,000 people buy my book and really love it.

Yeah.

Rather than my marketing was so good, I get a million people to buy it and it wasn't quite as good and they just, it was kind of a bit of a throwaway. Now having my book sort of matter to people or having the book sort of like influence people. I, there are people that tell me that they quote lines from Cain all the time. They're running jokes in families. Yeah. That's the world to me. So I would rather have, like I said, half the sales, but have it have more meat and more merit. Because the other side, the million sales, that's just amazing marketing. And that's fine, but I want it to be— I want it to mean more than that. And I think, like with your show, yeah, maybe it's not going to be number one, but it's up there. To be honest, it's very up there. But it also has so much substance and so much merit to it that people get a lot from it. Not just, I mean, like I said, not just an amazing advertising campaign.

Yeah. Well, and I mean, and what we're talking about, yes, we're talking about books, we're talking about creative endeavors, but it really is about the business. Any business needs to find those dedicated fans, needs to find those people who want to put in business terms, right? Customer lifetime value. Who are the people who are gonna come back, who are going to make it a family running joke, who are, everybody's gonna be reading it, they can talk about it, and they're, no matter what else you put out, they're gonna try it out because they trust you, they trust the brand, they know they're gonna get something that they really enjoy.

Right.

100%. And I think a lot of it comes down to, like you mentioned, this was a passion of yours for 3 years. When you embrace that passion of yours, when you embrace that thing you really love, you'll find other people that love that you love it and they love it.

Yeah.

Yes. Uh, just a little love fest. I love it.

Yeah.

So talk a little bit about humor obviously matters. Do you think that it expanded your potential audience or do you think it narrowed it?

I think humor, humor covers all sorts of sins. That's my favorite part of it. Like I'm writing a prequel right now and up to this new book, The Fast Light, and I'm delivering it out on Substack because a lot of people are using Substack. So I'm kind of testing the waters over there. And I've had a couple people say, well, technically that is a science fiction, right? They'll technically X, Y, and Z is like, yeah, but the thing is it's, it's humor. So, so technically if it's, if I can break a little bit of the laws of physics and it's funnier, I'm going with funny. And I get that permission. So being a humor writer gives me all sorts of, I have all sorts of latitude. Just do it wrong. If it's a funny moment or if it's funny with, with, no, I'm not going to wreck the story for a joke, but yeah, I get away with a lot of stuff simply because I'm a humor author. People come in there because they want to have fun.

Yeah. Well, and you just teased out your August release, the Facilitate Con. It's humorous, but it's also a sci-fi heist comedy. That is, I think you're inviting, like creating a new genre here.

Yeah. And that, that's what's so funny because like we talked before about the idea of a, of a, of a publisher. If I would've approached a publisher and said, I've got an idea. It's about this, this newbie captain. It's a sci-fi heist comedy. It's untested waters. You wanna try it out? They'd go, no, no, that no. I don't want to do that, but no, the Fastel Icon, it's, uh, it's about this con artist who takes over as captain of a starship after the rest of her crew blows up. Oh, um, and then, so, yeah, so inauspicious beginnings. And then to save her busted up ship, she has to pull off this impossible jewel heist with this new crew. She hires on a rich boy engineer and she's got a totally devoted and loving companion bot who might secretly be a weapon. So it's a sci-fi comedy. It's fun and humorous and all this. Uh, during the heist, they've got to find all these solutions to the problems they're probably creating. But underneath that, it's about what happens when life hands you something you never asked for and then goes, hey, how about I make this 10 times harder? Because Feynman doesn't set out to be captain. She never planned on leading anyone. And now she's grieving, she's broke, her ship is falling apart, and the only people available to her are deeply unqualified. And that's kind of what's at the heart of this story, because the hard truth is that life is— we were talking a moment ago— life isn't a solo sport, even though a lot of us try to play it that way. I know I do. And in this story, so does Feynman. But sometimes when everything goes sideways, the help we need comes from the last place or person or robot that we would have ever expected. And with all that fun and chaos, in the end, that's what I'm trying to convey in the book, that, that life Procurement is kind of a team sport, and you've got to find your team.

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And talk about releasing the prequel on Substack, cuz that is certainly a choice. Do you see that being something that you're going to publish as well, like as a companion book? Talk about the reason behind Substack and talk about building an audience on Substack. So I know I'm throwing a lot of things at you at once.

Yeah, so Substack is, is new to me this year, and so I've been experimenting with it, but like you were saying before, I, it's not like I'm gonna roll the dice once on it. So I'm just starting out. So just sort of putting this out. I already seeded it a bit cuz I write a weekly newsletter that's kind of funny. And so I started putting those weekly newsletters up on Substack to gain a couple hundred subscribers, and now I'm pushing this prequel at them. But like you said, you know, Substack can be really great when it comes to like notes in these various things, sometimes the articles don't get the pickup that you necessarily want, especially I'm just finding out now. I've only just put out the first couple of chapters of the prequel to the Fast Light Con, and I'm trying to build into that. But from a business sense, this will get a couple of readers, sure. But even if it isn't a home run for me, yeah, I'm gonna take all of that and put that into a little mini novel, a novella, and I'm gonna publish that. So I get two bites of the apple. Financially. So that'll be good. So it'll be something that gets people interested and then later on I can sell it. So I don't feel so bad if it isn't a massive success on Substack. I know that I can make money on it down the road. And it gives me a timeline too, because I've gotta publish these things a couple of times a week, which means that I'm on a deadline every single day. So I, I know I'm getting this novella done because I could see the calendar. Um, so yeah, no, it's been great. It's been really great.

Well, and then discoverability as well. When we're talking about, are you, you know, doing search engine optimization the normal way, the traditional way, or are you doing it for the machines? Having a Substack is going to help you have increased SEO, particularly for the book when it comes out in August.

Yeah. And it's like any other format and you can obsess a little bit when it comes to formats, but I also know that my Substack readership, the people really love the newsletter writes that I do every single week. But to be able to get that attention and not— I don't get too deep on SubSec, but you got to write those notes. You got to write— in my case, I write humorous notes. And so I write 2 or 3 of those a day and you can schedule those, whatever it might be. And those can gain traction. I had one note that is still going that has 8,000 likes on it so far, and that's getting me more and more subscribers all the time. So you never know. That's a bit of a roll the dice. I've written probably 100 or 200 notes and that one, for whatever reason, that one took off. But you've gotta write that 100 or 200 to get to that one that's gonna take off. And so you just gotta keep plugging away at it and just so, but I don't obsess too much, right? I've got so many other, it'd be really easy to obsess on Substack and spend a lot of time just getting real granular and spend all my time on it. I give myself an, an hour a day tops on it. I spend some time on it and then I walk away cuz I have so many other things I gotta take care of.

You are a workaholic. You also have narcolepsy, and it sounds like you have to write every day. You are doing media appearances like this. You also have your Substack newsletter. I know you're juggling a lot of things. How do you block out the right amount of time and also work around what could be a liability or a superpower with your narcolepsy?

Right. For me, I put everything in my calendar. My calendar looks manic. You know, I do color code it a bit, but then I forget what these colors mean. And then they just become differentiators. It's so sad because my wife on occasion will say, we're going to lunch. I said, is it in my calendar? You have to put it in my calendar. I don't have any idea. If it's not in my calendar, it's not something— it doesn't exist in this universe. So I definitely put stuff into my calendar and stack it in there. Some of the hardest things is just sticking to that and walking away from something. Because if I'm crafting, like if I'm doing ads or something, and I'm coming up with an image that I really like and I'm working on the image, I take a look at the time. I got to be done in 10 minutes. I really got to be done in 10 minutes. I give myself a little bit of leeway, but I know my own sort of OCD head. I'll spend the next 2 hours doing this. I have to have a cutoff time and I have to, I have to adhere to that as best as I can. And when it comes to the narcolepsy, I don't know if I've mentioned this before yet. You know, we all sort of have, have those things that get in the way, right? And I have this condition that means that I'm sleepy all the time. And so I have to find ways, like I try experiment a little bit with my diet a bit. I experiment with the times I sleep. I take naps during the day like I'm 4 years old, but that seems to help, little 15-minute naps. But also for me, it's reframing. And I may have said this last time, but it really helped for me to go like, I'm stuck with this now. I will always have narcolepsy. And so I can sit and wring my hands about it, or I could turn it around and take a look at maybe one of the reasons why this creativity thing works for me is because I'm half asleep most of the time. That my mind wanders into places that a lot of people wouldn't normally go because, like I said, that I'm sort of in a bit of a dream state. So I think the narcolepsy, even though it, it can be something to be kind of, kind of crippling during the day, cuz I'm so, so tired, that narcolepsy might be one of the things that helps me create the stories I create.

So listening to this, or anybody who's listening who has any kind of thing, any kind of ism or something that you've seen as something that's a hindrance to the work that you do. Turn that around and think about it as how can you use it as your superpower? I think that's a really powerful statement because I know I'm learning new things about myself all the time, right? What do I have now that I didn't think I had? Or that, uh, you know, is that aha moment? And then how do I say, oh, that makes my life make so much more sense now. But also, okay, how do I use that as a superpower instead of something that's holding me back? Right.

It's something inside you. It's not gonna go away. And it's up to you. You have to decide that, is that gonna be something that I'm gonna use as an excuse, or is it something I'm gonna use as fuel? It's your choice, whatever it might be. And I'm, I'm choosing to use it as fuel, and it seems to be helping.

And you've also mentioned you do about 90% yourself. So, and that's a lot being good scripting ads. Doing the graphics, knowing how to A/B test, where are you going to really find your audience and testing if what platform you're doing your advertising on, plus the organic social and marketing and outreach, plus actually having time to write, plus having the time to work on the business side of the money in, the money out, you know, monitoring what things that you may need to use or tools that you're like, why am I even still paying for this? So how did you learn to be skilled enough at these things to feel like I wanna do this myself? I don't need to hire an outside team to do it for me.

For one, I think when it comes to writing, a, a lot of things extend from the writing. And so I'm pretty good at, like, I've written television scripts, I've written, I've written short stories, I've, I've written fairy tales. As long as I have an idea of what that structure looks like, I can take a look as a writer. And when it comes to ad copy, it's the same thing. When it comes to writing copy for, for the books and that. And what I'll do is there's places where you can go, you can actually take a look at something called Facebook Ads Library, put in somebody's name, and that will just give you all the things that they're doing. So if that person's doing something right, take a look at what they're doing, go like, maybe I could kind of, I could fashion like, because, oh look, their primary text or whatever it might be, it's only 9 words in all of these, that must be something that's working for them. Let me try much shorter primary text and sell it this way. Whatever it might be. Yeah. So I take a look at how the stuff is working for me, but also what's working for other people. And I try and borrow that and use it in my stuff. And so within that, I'm also, I'm kind of cheap. So I learned, I taught myself how to use things like Photoshop and bits like that. And they're not killer because to be honest, my best ads that I have aren't the most, you know, this flourish and they aren't beautiful. They're actually quite simple. Usually it's sort of simple concepts that really work. Like I had one recently where, and this is for the Cain series, where it's just Cain looking into some water and the reflection is a wolf because he has a wolf inside of him. It's a real basic, really basic idea, but you see that, you go, oh, I get it, he's got a wolf inside him. It's those sort of like quick little notes and that, and that's just one that kind of popped into my head and I took, you know, a good couple hours to craft it, right? And it's doing that and does really, really well for me. So yeah, you know, some of it is inspiration, but a lot of it comes down to seeing what other people are doing is making that work for them and incorporating into what you're doing and trying it out. It may not work for you, so don't marry yourself to it, but test it out.

Yeah. Shout out to Facebook Ads Library. I tell my students to use that as well. I think it's gold and it's free.

So.

Yeah. It's kind of weird that they do that. I'm glad they do. I'm really glad they do.

Yeah. So thinking about perfectionism, thinking about how often we don't do things like publish a book that we want to write, a book that's inside of us because we're afraid of being an imposter, of not being good enough, of not being able to finish it and perfect it. Can you talk about the steps that you mentioned at the very beginning that you think people should take if they feel like they do have a book inside them and they're ready to maybe take some baby steps?

Okay, great. And I can even send this to you if it helps at all. So I have written these out for you. As I said, I'm, I'm not a course guy. I never held the course, but I do have something. So here we go. So, so if you're, if you've tuned into this because you're thinking, I've always wanted to write a book because 80% of us have, 80% of people say they've always wanted to write a book. Less than 1% do that. And really what it comes down to is about finishing. So here are a couple. And like I mentioned before, there's two parts to any writing and it's going to be the hand part, like the writing or the head part. You got to take care of both those things. So before you start writing this book, Write the book you want to read. This is what we were talking about before. Don't chase trends. So that's your first bit of advice. Don't chase after trends. Write the book you would like to see at the bookstore, the library. Number 2, don't announce to the world you're writing a book. Yes, there's that little dopamine hit when people go like, "You go!" Don't do that. Stop it. Just be quiet and write your damn book. But within that, find 2 or 3 people, and this is your third one, find 2 or 3 people that could be readers for you. Surprising, family don't make good readers. For one, I don't know how many times I give stuff to family and they just don't read it. I don't know what that is. And now I've written stuff that I kind of don't want them to read because a lot of their names are in my stuff. I don't need them to see that I've made them a monster. So yeah, so, so find 2 or 3 people that can give you a bit of feedback. You can find that like in online groups. If you know some people, it can help when they're a writer. One caveat to that, if they suggest something to you, how to fix something, don't listen to that. Readers can find stuff they don't like or doesn't work for them. They're not always right. That's why you want 2 or 3 people, but they never have a good idea for a fix. It's laughably bad. Don't do what they say. All right. Now, during the writing process, this is tip number 4. Have a daily writing goal. Come up with a number of words, whatever it might be. And if you— and this is, this is if you really want to write this book. And so this is the advice for this. So you'll want a daily writing goal. Is it, is it 500? Is it 1,000? Is it 2,000? Whatever it might be. Now, if you don't hit that, still write something. And this is that head part we were talking about, right? So let's say if you can only write a paragraph or a sentence or literally even just a word in your book, sit down and do that because that tells your head, hey, I'm a little bit farther along than I was yesterday. That inertia, keep that moving, keep that going. So just write a little bit every day, even if it's one sentence. If you want to get this done, do it that way. Have an ending in mind. Here's your next tip. Have an ending in mind. Some people might be plotters. I wanna plot everything out. Some people like me are what's called pantsers. You fly by the seat of your pants, but you want, you want an ending in mind because if I told you, hey, listen, get in your car and drive, you'd go, uh, uh, if I said just drive to Chicago, even if you don't know the way, you know, it's generally that direction and now you can go. Now the, the funny part is you might not get to Chicago, but at least the car is going. So have an ending in mind. You may not get to that ending, but that helps propel you forward. Finish before you fix. Now, there's other authors that have been doing this for a long time that what they'll do is they'll write a chapter, then the next day they'll edit that and they'll write the next one. As a, as a new author, don't, don't, don't bother with that. Just get to the end. Finish before you fix. Keep writing. And I've even done this to where like I might kind of, you know, get kind of confused or I might get a little bit lost. And I will literally put a part rather than like writer's block, take over. I will put a part on the screen that says, uh, Feynman comes up with smart idea here. And then I keep writing. Oh, just keep going. Get yourself to the very end. You want to finish it and then fix it. And your number one tip, your final one, give yourself permission to write garbage. First drafts are trash and they're supposed to be. That's why we have second drafts. So everybody's first draft is terrible. And every author— I do this every single book. I've written like 20 or 25 books or something. Every single book, about 3/4 of the way in, I'll go, this is, uh, this is awful. This is terrible stuff. I should set this on fire so it can warm people because at least then I'll have a purpose. So that's it. And then one final note, if you're on the fence and I make your insides all twist up, consider how you might feel if you never try to write the book. That regret is gonna be far worse than you sitting down and trying to write it. So give it a shot.

Those are excellent tips. And are you sure if, even if you don't have a course, you're, you're not going to add coach consultant to your repertoire?

When would I do it? I don't know.

I don't know.

But, uh, I'm already working. I'm already working 15 hours a day. I don't, I don't know if I could do the rest. My wife would kill me. My wife would absolutely kill me. She would change the locks on the house and kick me outside if I took, if I became a coach. I don't think I could.

Have you thought about having other publishers come under your publishing company? I mean, I'm not—

I do know other authors. I know what you mean. I do have friends of mine that have done that.

Okay.

And I would love to do that one day. My goal is, and we talked about this with the business all the time, my goal is I can hand off some of the little bitsy stuff I'm doing, some of the admin. This time next year, I wanna have like a virtual PA or a PA that can take some of that cuz Yeah, I would like to give back to others like people have given to me. So I would definitely like to do some more mentoring in that. And I don't know if it'd be something in, in the place of like a coaching scenario, but I definitely want to be able to give more to people because so many people have given to me and, and it just helping others like we're doing right now is one of the greatest things in the world that we can do. It fills me with such joy to do that. So if, and it's an open invitation, if you're starting to write something, feel free to send me a note about it. I would love to, I don't want to read every draft, but I would love, I'd love to hear about it.

Yeah. Amazing. That's such a generous offer. I have a feeling a lot of people are gonna take you up on that because I'm, again, I've had a lot of people on the show and I know a lot of people who, you know, outside of the show who do have the business of helping people publish books and most of them won't have those conversations. Most of them are looking at it as a business and you have to pay X amount of money to do anything. So it's a very generous offer that you're, that you're giving.

I don't want to get too deep into it because it's kind of late in the game here, but I am, in the last couple of years, I've become a Christian. And there is this beautiful thing within the religion, various religions, that talks of being salt of the earth. And I never knew what that meant. And salt of the earth in some interpretation can mean like, my job is to make your lives better. So I am the salt in your life, some small little bit that can help preserve something or make something taste a bit better. So anything I could do. As the salt to help your life, make your life a bit better, brings joy and it brings me joy. So I'm trying to be the salt as much as I can be.

Amazing. I know I'm like, this could be a whole other podcast episode, but really quickly, do you think that's changed the way that you write or the way that you look at writing?

Yeah.

I don't swear so much anymore.

Okay.

Yeah, a bit. You know, I think my stories have always had elements of hope and I'll give you a spoiler alert about my stories. The good guys will always win. Sorry, that's just it. You're gonna have fun with the story. But a lot of my stories are about people that sort of, uh, almost all my stories are people that kind of get forgotten or people that are kind of tossed aside or people that are ignored that do amazing things, which in a lot of ways is, is sort of that sort of larger story. So yeah, I, I think it's less like, has it changed me or more like, have I changed into that? And I think it's probably the latter.

Oh, this has been really fun. Just talking about, you know, and furthering the conversation, I should say, building on walking away, building the career, finding the right audience, figuring out how to do everything yourself, thinking about the different steps, the different methods we have to promote what we're doing, thinking about getting that story out and those great tips that you gave to everybody. So to everybody who's listening, you have a book inside you. I mean, I know I have like 5 books that want to get out of me, but the time, right? So think about how you can— you actually just encouraged me. I'm like, I've been trying to rewrite a book that's going to be co-authored book with somebody who already put it out, but we're adding a feminine perspective because it's about the world of Zen, and you know, it has a very masculine perspective now. And I just never take the time, and I forget about it with everything else I'm doing. But I'm like, why did I think about that? I just need to put it into my schedule every day that I'm going to answer one of the questions that I need to answer to insert that perspective in that section.

You do that and you'll be surprised. Yep. And then by the end, you're like, oh my goodness, I'm done. It seems like such a mountain. And then suddenly like, oh, okay, that's done. So yeah, do it.

Fantastic. So Dick, of course, my last question remains the same. Do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, family motto, words that continue to inspire you?

I like what we said earlier. I like that idea. Life is a team sport. I do like that idea. Life is a team sport, which means you've gotta be in other people's teams and they've gotta be in your team. So go find your team and be on somebody else's team. So I guess that's my quote. Life is a team sport, so play it that way.

Amazing.

Amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much. This has been a refreshing and honest and open and great conversation. I'm, Inspired all over again. And I know everybody who's listening is too. For those who are listening, thank you so much for coming back, and I will be back again with another amazing guest very shortly. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of Your Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.