The Aftermath

Hello, and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of Story Grid, the author of the book Story Grid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we just talk a little bit about what it's like to have Running Down a Dream out. So for those of you sick of hearing about Running Down a dream and the artist's journey, and you're ready for us to get back into fiction. That is going to come on next week. We'll be back into it next week, but I thought it was good to just reflect a little bit on the first week of having the book out. What it's been like, the kind of feedback I've gotten. And just to hear from Sean, you know, he's not just my editor now, he's also the publisher. Him and Steve are running Black Irish Publishing, who published my book. And, you know, I want them to be happy with publishing my book. And so, you know, we talk a little bit about what BlackIrish expects of me and expects of the book in the future as well. So I think it's a good conversation. Hopefully you'll get a lot out of it. So let's jump in and get started.

So, Sean, the book's been out a little under a week, officially. We were selling it a couple days before that, Running Down a Dream. And it's been just interesting to have this book out into the world for a couple reasons. So one is probably my favorite part is the. I've had several friends that did the, like, friendly thing and was like, okay, you know, I'll read Tim's book and then send me texts that, like, were surprised that they liked it, that it was good. I'm like, whoa, this is good. I'm like, I don't know how to take that, you know?

Right.

And so that's been good. I feel like there's these because, you know, most people, they won't. They'll either say really nice things and mean them. They'll say really nice things and not mean them, or they won't say anything, you know. Yeah, most people are not going to just tell you it's complete shit. And so I feel like that's been a good sign. And, you know, the reviews on Amazon have been good. But one of the things that has surprised me a little bit is I'VE had several people basically, like, send me long emails, offended at portions of the book. You know, there was one about the cursing in the book, but there was one I had sent out, just the introduction of the book, like up to the. Where it breaks for the first, like, because there's book one, book two, book three in the book. Right. So just that first introduction part, just taking complete, like umbrage with what I wrote and wrote me just this probably 1200 word email calling me a liar, saying that she's glad that I'm going to sell a lot of books, lying and making money off of it. And it was just like, it's just been strange because. Wow.

I mean, I just have to stop you for a second then. And I. This is the. You see, here's the big problem about starting to really think through and read criticism that is completely off the mark because what happens is that you're attracted to it. Right. And I can't help myself. Yeah. I'm so attracted to hear the reasoning behind how somebody can fault you for a subjective experience and say that you're lying when you're saying, this is what happened to me subjectively in my mind as I experienced it. So what did she say? Like, how could it be a lie? I mean, the introduction is just setting the scene of the book. It's setting up the problem, right?

Yeah. It's the part where I say that every problem is fixable. And it was basically, it was this. Her take on it was, it's nice that I've been able to fix all my problems, but eventually I'm going to come across a problem that I'm not good enough to fix. And at that point I'll have to realize that God created me broken just because I need him so I can come to him, because I can't do things on my own.

Okay, well, she didn't read the rest of the book. Right. Because. Right.

That's my thing. That's why I wrote back. I was like, well, I addressed it this later in the book, you know, and I never heard back.

I guess she doesn't know anything about the maturation plot, right. Where the character starts out naive and then at the end of the story they actually change. So that's what storytelling is about. Right. It's about experiencing the process by which the character changes over time. And people don't understand that in nonfiction. Nonfiction works best when you use the principles of great storytelling to make your ultimate point. This is what Steve Pressfield did for you and for me for that matter when we met with him in the fall is that you and I were like, well, here's the point of the book, and, you know, we're going to lead with this. And Steve said, what, are you crazy? You're gonna lead with the payoff? Are you crazy? That's your payoff, idiot. Right? I mean, he was a lot nicer about it than that.

He was very nice.

Yeah, but that was what he said, right? He was like, you're gonna start with the ending payoff? Are you nuts? So anyway, that's funny. I'm glad. Occasionally when you do get criticism like that, it. You can walk through the process and say, and it's not an arrogant sort of approach where you go, oh, I just know better than that person, and I'm right and they're wrong. And this is why knowing storytelling and the structure of storytelling, for me, it really deflates other people's and my own mistakes. Right? So you're not saying, oh, this I don't believe this woman. And she believes something I don't believe. What you're saying is, oh, she didn't read the whole book. A, so that's not good. And B, she's not familiar with story structure in that to hook somebody, you feed them something. Something that is attractive, right? It attracts them and literally hooks and pulls them in. So that was the point of your introduction, was to say, there are. I can solve any problem, right? That is pride and intellectual arrogance that every single human being has moments of. And this is why life is so wonderful, is that the environment that we live in is constantly challenging us and proving to us over and over and over again that that intellectual arrogance will be painfully brought to its knees. And, you know, that's. That's what your thing is. It's running down a dream is. It's a painful process, but very enlightening at the same time. Anyway, keep going. So tell me more about.

Tell me more about all the negative. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll come back to that. I was curious, like, does. Does Steve get emails like this about stuff he's written? Because I remember, okay? Because I remember on writing, Stephen King talked about, after I forget one of his books where in the opening scene, the villain, like, kicks a dog to death, and he got, like, angry emails saying that he was encouraging animal abuse, which is just so crazy. And so that's where I kind of feel like, well, you know, I'm just not used to having to process the fact that people are willing to spend that much time writing that much stuff to criticize when they could just not buy the book, unsubscribe, and ignore me, which is, you know, long term worse. I don't know. It was just interesting.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, the answer to the question is, does Steve get stuff like that? Yes, he gets it all the time. And it's a very difficult thing to ignore. And I'm trying to think of what the psychology of that is, but you really need to sort of do your best to let it go and take solace in the fact that if. If you're not getting people who are wildly opposed to what you write, you're not mining a thematic thing that is challenging to people. So if you just tell people what they want to hear and, and not try to truthfully and authentically describe an experience in all of its. In its dual paradoxical nature, meaning the good and the bad, then you're not going to get negative feedback. It's very difficult to face the fact that there is. There are forces in the universe that are negative. And I think it's very, very difficult to accept that fact because no one likes to feel poorly. No one likes to experience a negative emotional, you know, thing. And this is. This is why I take great umbrage. I don't know what the word would be, but I guess it would be umbrage with the whole happiness movement. Right. The happiness movement is sort of like, hey, why don't we all just be positive and happy? And that's fine for what it is, but that is not the way we experience things. We experience things at a very. It's the loss aversion fact. Right. In psychology and in all the research indicates that we would much prefer not losing something to gaining something greater. So loss aversion is a very, very important part of our brain chemistry. So, you know, just to survive, we have to feel negative emotion so that the predators don't destroy us and to say, oh, the predators are a figment of our imagination and there is no good or evil in the world. It's all subjective in the way you look at it. So if you just look at everything in a positive prism, then there's no badness. No, not true. You know, there's plenty of evil and malevolence in the world. And with the way we experience things begins negatively. And then we sort of have to process the experience in order to understand that that's just our initial first reaction to things. And that's an evolutionary thing where that's the way beings have to act on Earth, the first thing that's Unknown and strange. You have to say, oh, my gosh, it might be this. Something, you know, that could attack and kill me. So this whole happiness movement, and I know that there's great thinkers and there's, you know, entire university projects and research all about this happiness movement, but I think it's basically slicing half of the experience of the world and saying it doesn't exist. Anyway, I don't know how I got.

Into that, but, yeah, I mean, we're getting off subject. But I do feel like it also can create a lot of. For me, it can create a lot of fear and shame when you're not always happy. Like, then it's like, well, if I'm supposed to be, why am I not? There must be something wrong with me.

Yes.

You know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, yeah, it's been interesting. You know, I've. I've worked with clients that have dealt with criticism, and I've. I, of course, have dealt with some criticism, but it's definitely different with a book like this. And it reminds me a while back, I was getting interviewed about the StoryGrid podcast, and the person interviewing me, she was like, you must have to have a really thick skin. And I'm like, no, I know that I don't have to have a thick skin with Sean because I know he's looking out for me and he wants my best. And I also realized that everybody on the other side that are listening are just projecting onto me their own stuff. So if they get angry, like one of the reviews of the podcast, I think we've talked about this before, but I think one of the reviews of the podcast, that said, like, Sean is smart, but Tim is dim.

Oh, yeah, I love that one.

Of course. No, but just realizing that's them dealing with their own issues that they can't deal with. So they put it on me and just realizing some of the emails I've got from people are just like, they're not ready to deal with the fact that my book disagrees with them and that makes them uncomfortable or that another thing that I've run into a little bit when I've shared this story outside of the book is this almost like a fear that they don't want it to be that hard.

And so they have to kind of reject my story because they don't want to have to go through that on their own, if that makes sense. So it's just been interesting to get some of the feedback on it, but most of it's been good. I've been pleasantly surprised. My aunt Who? We're not super close. She's like, tweeting at me about how much she likes the book, you know, so that's cool. And so it's been good. I feel like it was, you know, I've been happy with how it turned out after working on it for so long, you know, and then you finally get a box of them in the mail and you're like, oh, my gosh, this thing is real now. What's going to happen? So it's been good. It's been a good first week of having it out. So, like, one of the things that now I'm looking down at what's next for it, because one of the things I like working with you and Steve is you don't put a lot of pressure on that first week of launching most of the publishers. When I've worked with authors, it's like that first week, it's almost like the book doesn't sell after that first week, because that first week's just so important. And with you guys, you guys are like, well, we'll put it out and then it'll sell, and then we'll go from there. Originally, when we had 34 pre orders, you're like, well, I'm happy with that. So how do you thinking now putting on the fact that you're my publisher and I'm the author, that you've invested a lot of money and time into publishing the book, how do you see this playing out over the next year or two with this book? If you could wave your magic wand about how this book would go and what would be spending my time doing around the book? Like, what would you like to see? As far as we've sold a little over a thousand copies of it, I think.

But we don't want to stop there. So.

What would you like to see happen with the book? And two, what would you like to see me spending my time doing around the book over the next one to two years?

That's a great question. Because it really. It took me, I don't know, 25 years to even come up with a semblance of an answer to that question. So I'm gonna really bore a lot of people by talking about the global progression of my career, in a way, because at some point in your career, you have to, especially in the creative universe, you kind of have to draw a line in the sand, and it takes a while to find where that line is for you personally, right? So for me, the great dynamic is commercial success, which is units sold, volume of dollars Review, attention, accolades, moving up the hierarchy of sort of external reward. And the external rewards are money in the bank, being able to upon an introduct to another person to be able to say, oh, you know that book that's number one on the New York Times bestseller list? Well, that's mine. Right? That's, that's a really potent thing. You know, it's, it immediately establishes you as a remarkable human being in the eyes of another person. And it's shorthand, right? It's just like, well, I'm the President of the United States or I run this organization that is the most beneficial to X, you know, group of people. That's a really potent, you know, elixir that it's great to have. So that's on the one one side of the abstraction. Now the other side of the abstraction is sort of the way you feel at the end of a. A very solid creative effort. And I'm not saying like you've produced anything amazing. I'm saying like at the end of three hours of intense writing and you think, you know what, I don't know if this stuff is going to work for me in any real way, but boy, I'm exhausted and I feel like I can go mow the lawn without, you know, feeling like I haven't done any work today. It's sort of. So that's an internal reward system that is really, really satisfying. But if you see somebody on the street and you go, you know, I'm feeling really great because I wrote 2342 words today that were pretty, pretty interesting that I didn't know that I would ever be able to write, they'll look at you like, yeah, so I don't care, whatever, right? So that's on the other side of the reward system, which is fully. It gives you a level of contentment that lasts for maybe nine hours until the next morning when you have to wake up and start it all over again. So you have these two poles of reward system. One is very external and the other one is extremely internal. And somewhere in between those two poles you want to find your line in the sand. And what I discovered is that at the very beginning of my career, the inputs that I was getting from the system, meaning the big publishing, commercial publishing universe, were really get into that external situation so that you get better projects sent to you from the biggest agents. So there's hierarchies of editors, there's hierarchies of agents, there's hierarchies of publishing companies. And the goal, when you become an editorial assistant is to rise up those hierarchies until you reach, you know, X position. I am the publisher of X, which is the best at X, and my best sellers are X. And, you know, I get to eat here, and I eat with this person who's the best at that. So there's all of these hierarchies that you're trying to climb up. Now. On the other side of the equation, there's another hierarchy, which is the thing that got you into book publishing in the first place, which is your interest in the creative art of writing. So you have these two things, again, that are competing for your attention in your own internal mind. Where do I really put my energy? Do I not spend an extra 20 hours editing that book? Because I need to spend those 20 hours going out to drinks with the head of ICM so that they'll send me their next big project. So you're constantly making these value judgments to progress in your career. And in order to rise within the publishing world, you really need to put your. Your chips on the external reward system and do the best work that you can creatively, but not at the expense of getting the big project in, because you could get fired if you don't get the big project. So that was probably like the first half of my publishing career was negotiating that world and thinking, when I have, you know, 40% of my list are on the New York Times bestseller list, then I can breathe, then maybe I can start doing something else. But guess what happened is that once you get to that place, then you need to have 50% on the bestsellers then 60% or whatever, right? So what I've come to full circle is that I finally figured out after a major career crash, I fell in through the thin ice of my life into a deep, icy, you know, chasm of pain. After I turn 40 or 41 or, you know, it's usually, you know, you haven't reached that point. I think you're on an accelerated path than I was, though, Tim. So don't worry. It's. The big crash is probably not coming for you. I think you've had a big one anyway. So after I realized that those pursuits were leading me to unhappiness, massive negative emotion. Now, I don't have a problem dealing with negative emotion because it's. I do like anybody else, but I understand the necessity of it. I needed more positive emotion. So I said to myself, what does give me the most pleasure? And that's sort of being very introspective and introvert and Working on manuscripts and thinking about global story stuff. And that's when I was talking to Steve, and he's like, well, you got to write the story grid book, because that's the thing that you're here to do, Sean, let's face it. And this is after working with him for 15 years, and he finally said, you know, you've been running around like a madman for 15 years. It's time that you write that book. And it took me another four years to write it, but I did. So then we started our. The Black Irish Publishing Company. And at the very start, we wanted to really lay out what, you know, what are. What's our bottom line here. And what Steve wisely said at the time was, I'll tell you what, let's not get too heady about it. Let's not to get too overwhelmed with our philosophical world. Let's just use something. If it becomes a burden to the point where we don't want to deal and it's so, then we have to stop it. But until that time comes, if we're not, let's have some fun and see what happens. But if it gets too much of a drudgery and terrible, then we'll just shut it down. And it was that simple process that started Black Irish. And the first book we brought to the world was, you know, a new edition of the War of Art. And so here we are, almost 10 years after we started Black Irish, and we published your book and Steve's new book, the Artist's Journey, which is a real. You know, it's like the war of Art 3.0. And the question that you've just posed to me is, what do you want me to do about making this thing continue to perform in an external way that brings in enough money? And my answer is simply, you know, there's a very fine line between hawking your wares and being a guy at the county fair selling toys that cost $2, and you try to get people to spend $20 for it and not doing anything. And the one thing that Steve and I always say is like, the thing that is the closest to you as your authentic creative process should be the least marketed. And what that means is that when you have sort of plumbed the depths of your soul and done everything that you can to be authentic in the project that you've created, that should be the thing that you talk about the least. So, like, Steve has been approached over the years for any number of really great marketing ideas to take the War of Art from where it Is. Which is a very nice place to say, a level that would make it sell a million copies a year for year after year. And he and I look at each other with stars in eyes and go, wow, wow. Imagine all the great external stuff we'll get doing that. And then one of us will go, you know, we can't do that. And he'll go, yeah, that's true. Or I'll say, that's true. And. And the reason why we can't do that is that it's. It would just. It wouldn't be a good thing. You know, it would hurt the book, and the book is the book. And it's sort of. It's not Steve's or mine anymore. We're just sort of like the guys who make sure that it's available. And I think that's true. I think once the artist creates the work, you know, we want. We want people to know about it. And so we don't want to sort of like, bashfully just put it out there and say, oh, I'm done. I've just created the thing, and now I stick it out there, and it's up to the universe whether or not it's gonna work. Well, no, that's not true. You have to expose it, as I've said a million times before, to, like, 10,000 people who would be mildly interested enough to read the first page. And once you do that, then I think you're done. I think then the thing is going to live or not live or percolate or not percolate or do whatever it does on its own. So what I would say to, you know, to wrap up this very long answer, is that once we've sort of exposed it to 10,000 people, and I think we're probably really close to that number now, then your job is kind of done. And when people talk to you about it and say, well, why aren't you doing more for that book? You say, well, we've done what we propose to do, which is to find 10,000 people who have been naturally interested in this subject. And we've said, hey, here's this thing I've created. Check it out, and I hope you buy it. And now we kind of let it live its own life. And that has proven to be satisfying for Steve and I. Now, would it be great if more of our books sold more all the time? Sure. But we don't want to invest our limited creative energy on marketing after we've done our core marketing work, which is 10,000. So what I want you to do is to say, God bless you. Running down a dream. I'm really glad that I created you. And now you're on your own. It's sort of like. It's like your kids, right? At some point you have to say, okay, you've got to go play that baseball game. I can't play it for you. I've. I've given you everything I can, but you got to do it yourself. And I think that's what we have to do with our creative projects. We say, hey, you know, this is an important thing that I've created, and I hope you take a look. And then you say, okay, it's now yours. I've got to go work, you know, with my other kids. I've got to go create my other kids now. And that might sound, you know, cliche and cheesy, but I think it's true. And, you know, sometimes the things don't explode immediately. Years and years ago, when I first started out, there was this really terrific book, and it was called A River Runs Through It. And it was written by a guy named Norman Maclean. And it had been, you know, it had been around since the 70s. And I remember there's this great, you know, he's not here anymore, a guy named Knox Berger, who's this great, you know, agent who'd been, you know, he'd been through the business forever, really cranky, had a cane. He would, you know, yell at you if you made a mistake.

And.

And he. He represented A River Runs Through It. And what happened was, is I think Robert Redford bought the rights, and he was going to make a movie, and he had this new young star who was going to be in it named Brad Pitt. And so Knox is like, you know what? It's time to reissue this puppy. And he's. You know, he sent it out, and people were like, yeah, okay. And he got it maybe $100,000 to reissue the book. And, you know, it sold a million copies 23 years after it had initially been published and was selling maybe 8 to 9,000 copies a year for 20 years. And then it became a much larger thing. And I think when you write something of quality. And the River Runs through it was written by. It was an ode to this man's childhood and his relationship with his brother and his father when they used to go fly fishing. So it wasn't like, I'm gonna write this incredible thriller about, you know, the explosion of Mars. You know, it was really a very personal story by a guy who didn't really write Anything after that. And my point is that he created this thing and it found a really sweet, wonderful 8000 copy audience for 28 years, and then it got exposed to a larger audience through no work of his own, just through Robert Redford reading the book and going, you know, I'd really like to make this movie. I'd like to take this guy's creation and give it a visual context. And then it became even larger. But he didn't, like, he wasn't knocking on Robert Redford's door for 25 years saying, you got to read this and make a movie of it. No, it was an organic process. That was a beautiful process that created something from somebody's imagination, a reflection on his past that had a 45 year lifespan that took a long time to develop. And those are the things that we just smile about and we say, hey, that's really cool. That's, that's what creativity is about. That's art. And, you know, and then, then there are other things that are more about marketing and sizzle, and that's fine too. But for me, I'm at the point in my life where I'm really skewing towards the. I feel better when I get in my 2,000 words a day, and I think I might be able to use them at some point in my future creative life. And I think that's where you intuitively feel yourself, Tim. And even though you're the book launch marketing guy, I think you have sort of been moving on that spectrum of value further to the Creating your own novel and building your own sort of. And Steve said this in our podcast a couple of weeks ago. Hey, man, you're just beginning on your artist journey. You don't know where this stuff is going to lead, but you're intuitively on the road, right? You're on the road now. And I think you don't want to step back and go, oh, well, I'm the book launch guy. So let me just go back to not, not that you're. You can't still do that stuff. But if Steve hadn't said to me, sean, yeah, I know you're an editor, that's great, and you can continue being an editor, but you've got to write. Steve basically said that to me, I know you're an editor, but you've got to write. And I'm like, yeah, okay. He's like, but you've got to write what it means to be an editor. So you have to take your internal abstractions about the craft and broaden them. So that other people can understand what you do, because what you do is really important. And the more people know about what editors do, the better stories there will be. And the better the stories there will be, the further chances that we won't be duped by, you know, really nasty storytellers who only tell us half the story, the better. So that's what I want you to do over the next two years. I want you to finish the threshing and make that your next thing. And I think you need. After you feel comfortable, it's not for me to tell you when, but when you feel comfortable that you've exposed your running down a dream to as many people as you think is necessary, then you say, you know what? Steve and Sean are happy right now, So I just have to make me happy. Once I'm happy, then I can move on. But I don't want you to think that there's this menu of tasks that Steve and I think that you should do in order to make us more money. The other thing Steve said to me when we started Black Irish Books was, hey, man, as long as we break even.

We'Re a little ahead of even. So we thank the gods and we keep doing what we do. So I'm not saying don't do anything. I'm saying do what you think will make the most sense for you to reach a point where you can say, hasta la vista, running down a dream, and it's gonna have its own life, and I can't, you know, be shouting from the rafters about it all the time.

Yeah, that's just so interesting. It's still just like, you know, it doesn't surprise me that you answer that way. But at the same time, I'm like, yeah, but you're the publisher. Like, you're the one that your job is to tell me to work so that you don't have to work so that you can make money off of the book.

I put my trust in the creative process, right? So if I had phoned in my editorial work with you, meaning if I didn't invest everything I had in getting you to write the book that I think you wrote, then I might be like, you know what? We got to sell as many of these suckers as fast as we can, because there's no way this thing is ever going to have a life of its own. But, you know, I'm satisfied with the work I put in there. I think I did a great job. I think you did a great job. And the end. So I don't look at the work that I do now as a revenue stream. I look at the work that I do now as did I give everything I had to the, to the process? Did I bring all of my experience and everything I know about story up to the moment that I'm learning, I'm continuing to learn every day more about story. So I need to just sort of bring my A game. And if I have, then I'm satisfied. And if the book. I'm not going to ever say, say nobody buys any more copies of your book. Let's say for whatever reason, yeah, we like the book, but it's just not, you know, it's not going to live a long life. I don't care. I did everything I could for the book. It's its own thing. And I think when you hit that place, it takes a long time. It really does take a long time. And it doesn't mean that I don't get upset when people make a critical remark on Amazon about Story Grid or I don't get upset when people think I'm, you know, I'm making up stuff as I go along. I do it really, but I know I'm bringing everything I have to it. And as long as I do that, then I'm cool. And it takes a long time to get there. And even if this is, I mean, this is the point of your book, even if the Story Grid isn't bringing any revenue anymore, it's still my life. It's still what I know I'm supposed to be doing here. I'm supposed to helping people create better stories. Makes the world better. I truly believe that. So that's my purpose. And whatever revenue or external reward comes from that is great and I appreciate it, but it's not the reason why I'm doing it. And I think that's what you have to find as a writer is that, yeah, we all like the external reward. We all want the money. We all want to be introduced as a New York Times best selling writer to strangers. But that only that's really empty. And anyone who has reached that level would confirm that. And if, if they don't confirm that, they probably just had their book hit the New York Times bestseller.

They're currently on it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Okay, that's helpful. I mean, it's interesting because, you know, I've been thinking about how I want to continue to talk about this book and a friend of mine, well, Jeff was encouraging me to just start putting it out, like start talking to small groups of creative people. You know, I spoke at, like, a group of about 100 Nashville podcasters the day the book came out. And, like, that was a lot of fun. It went well, you know, gave a lot of books away. And then I've gotten invited to two other just local events where, you know, it's 100 or 200 people that are just creative people. One of them is a writers group. Another, I think it might just be, like, artists in general. And then I'm talking a friend of mine at the gym. He's a musician here in Nashville, and he's a successful musician here in Nashville. And I had given him a copy. He's like, well, I want to pay you for it. And I figured out the code phrase to get people to just take a copy of the book and stop offering to pay me for it. I just say, oh, my publisher gave me these to give away, and they're like, oh, okay. And then they'll take the book. Otherwise, they keep trying to pay me. I'm like, I understand what they're doing. And I felt that way, too, but I'm like, if you just read the book, that's worth more than the $9. But I was like, well, I said, instead of paying me, why don't you tell me how I can get a copy of this book in every musician and songwriter's hand in Nashville? He's like, I can help you with that. And I think that's the thing. If I think about what I want for the book, it's mostly just I want to get it into as many people's hands as possible that do creative work and probably have been or are stuck in the kind of places that I write about in the book. And so that's kind of what I'm thinking now is I'm just going to keep, like, trying to find small pockets of creative people, make sure they know about the book, and then just do that for a while and see how that feels.

That's the perfect approach. Because you're just saying, hey, it's like what Seth Godin always says, hey, I made this. You want to check it out? It's like, that's like the best soft sell ever. And just explaining, look, the way a book sells is if people love it and they tell their friends. So my publisher gives me these books so that I can give them to people who are interested, and if they like it, then they'll tell somebody else. And so if you don't like it, you're not going to tell anybody about it. So that's the way our marketing works, I mean, it's really that, you know, personal. And so if you can make the personal connections to people who will benefit from reading it, then yeah, that's a great marketing effort. As long as you're not like two for five bucks, you know, as long as you're not on the corner, you know, buy one, get seven free. You know, like, don't.

Not yet.

Yeah, don't devalue the project. Like, it's like what you always say. It's like there are two ways that you work. Either your set price, which is very expensive, or free. So that's the way we operate too. So, yeah, taking nine 95 each time. You know what people do is they give you the 10 bucks and they go, what am I going to do with this piece of shit now? And then they throw it out. They're like, the guy really doesn't, you know, he's just after my 10 bucks. And that's the beauty of books, is that nobody thinks that anybody's trying to. When you give a book away for free, they know it's a gift. Right? It's a literal gift. It's not trying to sucker you into buying 25 dance lessons.

Right.

Yeah, we. I was talking about that yesterday with some people of, like, it's the perfect. Because I think comedians said at one point, talking about the people handing out flyers in New York, where he's like, they're basically saying, here, you throw this away.

Here, take this and throw it away.

And that's how almost every marketing material is. We try to ignore billboards, we go to the bathroom during commercials. But yet a book is still a gift. But the best marketing is just having somebody read your book because then it feel like they'll tell somebody else. Yeah. So it's an interesting thing. And it's interesting too, the way that books have a timelessness that other things don't have.

Right.

Like, if you hear about a book that's been out for 10 years, like, and you still hear about people reading it, you're like, okay, yeah, that's a. I need to do that. But, like, you want to watch the new movie, not the old movie in most cases, unless it's like, definitely a classic. But it's always the new thing, the new thing, the new thing where, like, even how I select books is like, if it just came out, I'm like, ah, let me give it a while. And I literally kind of forget about it unless I hear about it again six months later. Right. And then I'll like, okay, well, maybe it's going to stick around. Or maybe enough people have told me about it. So yeah, I've always appreciated that about the way you guys think about marketing. And you're much more interested in is the book still drip, drip dripping a year from now than whether or not it had a big launch?

Oh yeah, that's the real test. And some books do and some books don't. And oftentimes something will get discovered like a river runs through it 20 years after publication. So never say never.

Yeah. Okay. Well, next week we will do what you say. Let running down a dream start living its life, and we'll get back into the threshing and start seeing if we can turn that into the next thing, right?

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