How Podcasting Expands Network And Influence In The Healthcare Industry With Marianne Sciucco Of Untangling Alzheimer's And Dementia, An AlzAuthors Podcast

Wish you were one of those influencers with raving fans who binge on your every word, consume all your content, buy everything you have to sell, and demand even more. Then stay tuned while Authority magazine columnist and buzzfeed contributor Tracy Hazzard shares strategies, tips and tactics from top videocasters, podcasters, authors and social influencers on creating that bingeable factor. Now let's join Tracy as she explores how to rise above all the digital noise with the binge factor.

Welcome back to the Bing Factor. I'm Tracy Hazzard and I have a group that podcast all together. So I've got Marianne Schuco and she is a part of the whole Care Network, the Home Care Matters Network, and ALZ Authors. She is bringing together ALZ Authors, a Untangling Alzheimer's and Dementia, an ALZ Authors podcast. And they are co marketing together, they're helping to promote together. They banded together because they're all focused on the same niche, Alzheimer's and dementia care. And I think this is really interesting because you've got your storytelling within this market and network and I think this is really a beautiful way to build a podcast network, to build a show together than when you're really focused on the same audience. And that is so unique. So often I get networks and other things that just don't have that kind of focus. So I'm really impressed with everything that Marianne does here and so glad to be able to bring her forward. Marianne Schuco is a registered nurse, dementia daughter, and author of the novel Blue Hydrangeas and and Alzheimer's Love Story. She's the founding member of ALZ authors.com and a director, manager, and podcast producer and host. So take a listen to this show and Marianne Shuko.

Marianne, so what a tough subject. What a really broad and yet narrow focus that you've picked on. So, I mean, Alzheimer's dementia, there's so many ways you could have gone with this, but you decided to go the caregiver story routes, the stories of what's going on of. I love the model that you've built here. So all's Authors blending in with the ALLS Authors Podcast Untangling Alzheimer's and Dementia. I just love that model of what you've done together here. How's it been working?

It's been working great. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It was such a natural thing because I'm an author. I had written a book called Blue Hydrangeas, An Alzheimer's Love Story. I'm a nurse And I have been on my own dementia journey, so. And many others, vicariously through my profession. But I was having a difficult time marketing my book, as you can imagine, and decided to reach out to some other authors that I was acquainted with to see if maybe they wanted to cross promote with each other to help promote the books and to also bring awareness to Alzheimer's and dementia caregiving. And we started that back in 2015. It was just three of us at first. And now we have over 300 authors in our organization, more than 300 books and resources, and we work pretty hard. We're a small but mighty team. Everybody works for free. We're all volunteers. Everybody's been on a journey. We all know what we're talking about. Everybody's written a book. So for the most part, or some other resource, films, podcasts as well, blogs. But primarily we focus on books because we believe that storytelling is an important component in caregiving.

No. And it ties really well to podcasting, because storytelling and podcasting is essential. I think it's an essential part of the process. And I love podcasts. It's one of my favorite areas to cover is what I would call edutainment, where you're educating, but you're entertaining. And whether it's a sad story or not, it's still entertaining in the fact that you're helping to sink that educational piece in, sync that message in.

Through.

Through the story. And you do that really well with your authors. And maybe because they are all the authors that are coming on your show, that they already have kind of this ability to weave that story into what they're talking about. But, you know, I think you just touched on the biggest thing. Marketing books is really hard. And I would love for you to, because I think there's some aspiring authors out there that are listening to this who maybe are thinking, do I write the book first? Do I start a podcast first? I would love to know your advice on that as well as really what is the hard part about marketing book?

I think the hardest part, marketing a book is that there are just so many books, so you're just competing against every day. I think I read that on Amazon, publishes like 10,000 books a day or something crazy like that. A million books a year. It's just insane. And so you just become like a little drop in the ocean. And if you don't have a platform, see, that's the key word, a platform which to launch your book, it's going to be very hard to gain any traction. So that was my issue back in 2013, when I first published my book, it was self published. I had no idea what I was doing. I'm a nurse. I had majored in English in college and some people go to college and major in marketing. And so after four years they kind of know what to do. Business. I had no knowledge. So anyway, I managed to get the book out there and tried to build my own little platform. And it's really slow going, you know, working and just don't have a lot of contacts. But what we ended up building with all authors is a platform for other authors to use when they launch their book. So they come to us looking for us. Yeah. And so we have provided them with all of these tools.

Well, I love that you've leveraged that together by creating a niche. There's so often that there's a lot of networks for authors, but it's so broad because you've got an author who writes about addiction and then you've got an author who writes about Alzheimer's and then you've got an author who writes about fitness. And they're just so broad that the audience isn't all there. That that's not a true platform. A platform is built on the actual people who might read your book or refer your book to other people. Right. Like that's as essential in the process. And I imagine over the years now and with 300 authors that you've managed to build this broader connection piece to where that community's eager to hear what the next book that comes out is. So you've got a built in platform already ready for that. That's huge.

It is huge. And we have two audiences. We have our authors whom we service by providing them with opportunities to get their book out there. But we also target our caregiving audience, which is number one. The idea is to get these books into the hands of the people who need them. And so we offer a clearinghouse for people to go to if they are looking for resources. They're not going to be wasting a lot of time wading through a bunch of stuff that doesn't apply to them. They can go onto our website, they can look to the categories say caring for your mother. And they will find a variety of books about caring for their mother. And each author writes a blog post for us specifically why they wrote their book and about their story and about their book. But it's much more personal than just going to a book sale page and reading the little synopsis that they give.

No, it's much more personal. I read your Blogs there and they're really personal and I like that. So one of the things I want to ask you about here is blue hydrangeas. So why blue hydrangeas? Why was that the title of your book?

So my book takes place on Cape Cod and the main characters are innkeepers. They own a bed and breakfast and they named their bed and breakfast Blue Hydrangeas after the beautiful blue flowers that grow all over the Cape. If you've ever been to the Cape, you will have seen them. They're amazing. I can't grow them here at my house in New York. It doesn't work.

I've tried growing them. I'm from Rhode island and they used to have them all down, up and down the coast in Rhode island. And I've tried growing them in multiple places, including upstate New York. And it did not do well.

Did not do well, doesn't do as well. I mean, and they're just, they're captivating and I love them. I just, they make me feel good. So when I was thinking about this book and thinking, you know, they were going to name the house and I was coming up with all these possible names for their house, and then I thought about the blue hydrangeas and then I thought, you know, well, what kind of people name their house? Because if you get onto the shore like Cape Cod or other places, people always put little plaques on the side of the house with the name, you know, So I came up with that and then I thought, well, innkeepers, they name their house. So that's how they became innkeepers and they're living this beautiful retirement lifestyle. Then the wife.

But I think that that's like, you know, it's part of the charm of the way. I see a lot of the books on your platforms when I'm looking through them, there's this connection piece in a story. So blue hydrangeas personally connected with me. That's why I wanted to point out the story here is like, that's something that I have loved about all the places that I've lived. It's one of the things that I adore. And so it connected with me and it made me go, oh, let me check out the story. So that there are these little personal touches in both the way all these books are titled. And I don't know if you're helping to advise them, but there are these like personal connected pieces instead of these. Like really. I mean, I have to say that in a lot of the self help book areas or the character, like you see a lot of Dry titles, those like, you know, like how to survive this and how to do that. And that's not the way your books are titled there. They are very story driven.

Yes. So the books are already published when we get involved. So we don't have any input on titles. But they're all based on personal experiences. These people literally bleed onto the page and they conjure up very difficult memories and time in their life that most people want to forget and do it because they want to help other people, because they know that they have been on something tremendous and what they've learned from it is so valuable. You can't get that anywhere else. There's nowhere to learn how to be a caregiver for someone with dementia. Even, you know, you can read every book and nothing's going to capture the entire experience. So we don't have anything to do with that. And you know, a lot of books titles now are. They're SEO packed.

Yes, they are. Search engine optimization for you newbies out there. Right. And so yeah, so I want to just dive into these two pieces that we're talking about on the platform idea because platform's a term, it's a very old school book publishing term and it is not something that everybody understands until they get into it that you start hearing this word platform again and again. And there's a different types of platforms. There's what we call authority platform, which is actually a digital technology term. It's this search engine optimization. I have an authority because it doesn't matter how popular and amazing you might be and how great it is that people want to read your book and hear about you. But if the search engine that is Amazon's book search engine or Google's search engine doesn't serve you up first and foremost, then you're hidden, you're hidden expert. And that doesn't help anybody progress. So you got to play the digital authority game and you got to have a great book at the end of the day that people are going to review and love and share and, and help, you know, want to push out what you've got to help others. That's going to grow your platform and your community. So it does have to have both sides. And very often authors think they only need one that which is the non digital version. And so your podcasting model and your blog model of what you've built on your website actually helps them do both in a better way. Because most often book recommendations, recommendations for podcasts, recommendations for help things that we type into Google at 2 in the morning. Because we're stressed out and worried about how we're going to carry care for our parent that just got diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer's. Right. That happens at 2 in the morning. And we're going to do three things. We're going to Google it, we're going to check Amazon, and we might check out a podcast or a video. And so those are the just the areas that we're going to dive into at those private times when we're looking for help. And you're going to show up in all those places. And now your authors are too. You created this wonderful model for them being found when someone needs them the most. Because no amount of push marketing is going to help them. Because I may not have that problem today. I don't have it until three weeks from now, and I may not remember that I saw an advertisement from you. So it doesn't work like that. It works to be in the right place at the right time for someone who needs you. And you built that.

Thanks. I love hearing you talk about it.

Well, you know, this is the other thing, though, is that once someone finds you, they now have all these resources. So by not having each author have their own podcast, each author have their. Each one of you working so hard to build a community, you've banded it together, which makes it so that I can binge. And this is your binge factor for untangling Alzheimer's and dementia, alls authors is to be able to make a place at which I can binge on whatever I need at the moment. So if I need stories that are based on caring for my parents, if I need stories on a sandwich generation, which is when you have aging parents and children that you're caring for at the same time, like, it doesn't matter what my needs are, there's going to be one of your episodes and one of your authors that covers this. And that means I can skip around, I can find what I'm looking for. I can binge the entire catalog. I can really get a very concentrated amount of help quickly and find what I'm looking for. So from a caregiver perspective, your audience perspective, you have made a wonderfully supportive binge experience.

Thank you. It came after a lot of hard work and no planning.

But you know what? That's okay. Stumbling into it is perfectly good. But let's talk about how you got started. So I heard your very first episode, and you were being interviewed by Chris from the whole Care Network. And I love that that's the first episode, because the first Episode is so difficult for podcasters to like, how do I tell you about my show? And he does it in an interview model, which so helped. But I gather there's a story here as to how you ended up podcast podcasting, and so tell me that story.

Well, I am a listener. I. I listen to podcasts all the time, and I listen to audiobooks, so I love audio. I know it's really valuable, especially for busy caregivers who don't have time to sit and read a book. So Chris had grown his whole Care network, which is dozens of different podcasts related to health and wellness and caregiving, and approached me and asked me if I would be interested in doing a podcast. But, I mean, no, I wasn't. I didn't know anything about how to do a podcast. How do you edit audio files? I don't have equipment. I didn't know anything about it. And yet he continued to pursue and encourage me to take it on. And so as we thought about it more and more, you know, the problem was publishing all of the blog posts and doing all of the work that we were doing on social media, trying to generate traffic wasn't working the way that we had thought. And part of the reason why I, like I said, caregivers don't have time to sit down and read a book, and many people don't read, period. And even if they are, just the idea of thinking, gee, I'll read this book, and you know, that's going to take 10 hours out of your life and you don't have it. So you might just say, forget it, I'm not doing that. So I thought, well, you know, maybe we do need to have an audio component where we can bring the stories to people. An hour's format where they can listen when they have 10, 15 minutes, when they're doing something else, they can shut it off, they can go back to it later, they can listen to it again, and then maybe that would motivate them to take the next step.

And, yeah, because it helps them really understand, am I going to connect with this author? Am I going to connect with this book? And is it going to be worth that amount of time that I'm going to have to invest in reading that? So it really gives you that without having to. To do a lot of heavy lifting on the listeners. And I think that's really smart. What I really like about it, though, is that you've dovetailed into Chris's model as well. So Chris McClellan, Whole Care Network, what he's done is create models of support for caregivers in general, like all kinds of caregivers. And so you're that niche within it, that is Alzheimer's and dementia, and then he has others within that. And so by doing that, it's creating a greater resource model. So as we talked about before, is that you're a resource to those caregivers who then some of those caregivers might become your authors and then you support them too. So like it does go both ways. But getting the resource to referral networks, people who are going to refer many, many people, they have multiple needs, they need Alzheimer's, they need heart care. Like they, you know, they might need all different kinds of care that they are referring people out to. So having one network that can do that and has many, many shows that are professional in how they're also produced makes a big difference here. And I think that that really actually has been in your favor. So on our network we have a lot of healthcare style shows and they have a hard time, especially if we like talk about the self help, the addiction space, the caregiving space. Even within that, there's not as much communication between others. So like I'm less likely to go out there and share that on social media and say I'm listening to this great podcast and it's been helping me deal with this. It's too raw. And so the sharing of a show is more limited to I might be in a Facebook group with other people who are like me and I am sharing your show within that, but I'm less likely to share it to the broader audience. That is my followership. And so that makes it more difficult for a show to grow when you don't have a referral network. Yeah, so that's what's brilliant about your whole model here. So your model for the authors has done that. The model for the network you build yourself with and on the model that you're also putting yourself in those blogs and in the podcast. And so in the audio space, it's also crossing all the different dimensions of things that you need. So that's really great. So what I want to know is how's it going for you? How is the monetization model working in terms of like, are people really selling books? And is this working for growing your network? I mean, you've got still, I know everybody's a volunteer, but it's still a lot of time and energy put in. So is the return on investment there for you and for the network and for the authors in general?

Well, as Far as book sales, we don't really know because we don't have any access to that unless authors tell us. We just made a book sale. We have an annual book sale for Caregiver Appreciation Month. And the point of it is to try to gain visibility. That's our number one goal. But book sales would be nice. And we're finding that the book sales didn't pan out the way that we would hope so that's an issue. But we mainly our finances come from our donors. We're a 501c3 nonprofit, and we get monies from really the authors themselves. They are not charged any money to be on our network, but we do ask them to make a donation if they would like. And we have other donors coming. We don't even know where they're coming from. And some of them are extremely generous. So I haven't done any monetization. It's in discussions. We've always prided ourselves on being, like, really clean without having to, like, pad our website or a blog or a podcast with things that may not be relevant. But we do know that the podcast is the one place where we could take on advertising of products that were related, you know, for our audience.

Well, you are already have ads on the show, so you do have ads for the whole Care Network. You have ads for your own 501c3. So, like, you're running what we call promos rather than ads. Right. They're just a little bit of promotion. So you are already like, kind of, I'm going to say, primed your audience to accept that. And especially if they're very relevant, I think you can command that at this point. You certainly have enough episodes. You certainly earn the right to do that. I think the decision is how you do it. Right. I mean, it's like you don't want to have five minutes of ads before your stories start. You really need to do it in a nice, fluid way that respects the audience. Right.

You know, that's why I start every episode. Well, with the author interviews. I start every episode with an excerpt from the interview with some kind of a hook to get people into, you know, what this is really all about, or some kind of hot statement that they might have made.

Yeah. And sometimes you'll also start with a little. I've heard you start with a little bit of story about why you brought this author on or some little background bit before you played a clip. So you've done a couple of episodes where you do that. I think it works both ways. Right. Anything where you're doing what I would call the preamble. Right. And you do a little bit of preamble. It really helps to say, I want to wear it around. And I'm okay with listening to a couple promo spots before this happens.

Right. And then we do virtual events. And so we. Those are recorded and they go up on YouTube and then into the podcast as well. So I know those have a bit of a different intro because everything is included already in the show. So we do like, we usually have like five, four or five panelists at a time. So those are hard to edit. I record everybody on a single track on the wrong track.

Yep, they are hard to edit.

Yeah, they're hard to edit, but you can clean it up really well.

Yeah, they're worth it. And, you know, it's something that's, you know, when you do those panels, the important part as the moderator, as the host, is to really make sure that you've differentiated the voices when their voices are too similar and they don't say, hey, this is so and so when you're listening, it gets really confusing and hard. It's just as hard for the audio editor, but it's really hard for the listener too, to follow along when there isn't a distinction in voices. And so just a tip to planning panels, find, you know, distinct voices. So that's helpful. Well, I really enjoyed. I mean, I think so many of the authors of the episodes that I listened to had this story of looking at it in retrospect, that they were not in the middle of it at this moment when they're writing this. And I think that that's really an interesting thing because you've got this community and platform that you're building that is then going to lead to them becoming authors with them. Are you thinking about, and I mean, this is just an idea, is that. Are you thinking about maybe starting to make a more distinctive connection and maybe partnership with a book authoring company that could also make kickbacks into the organization when someone comes from your audience into becoming an author with them?

No, not at all.

I think that would be a great idea because I guarantee you there's someone in the audience that is going like, I have this story that's burning, but I don't know how to do it. And if you connect them to someone who you believe is really who you know, because you've got 300 authors. So I guarantee you there's some bad stories and good stories about someone who's gone through and has a great publisher or somebody they worked with or ghostwriter, whatever it is that they worked with. There's some model in there that could really work for you. And those referral fees that you would normally pay could be paid into the organization and that would be, I think, also another monetization. I'm always looking at ways for alternative monetization, especially when you want to, when you want to keep it clean and not just run random ads.

Right? No, I mean that's a really great idea. We are working with someone next year, early in January to do like a write a writer's workshop for caregivers. Most of the books were written, they were journals that people kept and that was became the backbone of their book. And some people are writing in real time because they're blogging and the blogs are current. This is the situation today. So it's not reflective. And then they go back and they turn their blog into a book. But I mean that's a really intriguing idea to come up with that because so many of them are self published. And we could certainly do like a seminar on how to publish your book. I used to teach classes in independent publishing, so I could teach how to publish a book on Amazon. I could do that. But I don't know like about. We're an Amazon affiliate so we do get income from them. Right.

And I don't think it changes anything to be self published. Like there's a lot of, I think book networks and book just book assistance, like if you want, like the workshops and writing and helping somebody support you through that, there's a lot of those that are very low cost and also though they end up self publishing anyway, so the model is still going to work for you. So I think that's really interesting. The other thing you mentioned is audiobooks. Like I think that one of the things that self published book authors don't realize is that a lot of those that get book deals end up writing away their rights to the audiobook. And so if the publishing of the book doesn't do well enough, the audiobook never happens. And they actually don't have rights to record that audiobook at the end of the day. And you're right here, an audiobook is actually maybe even more valuable than the printed book.

Right.

For these busy caregivers who are going to be the readers and listeners of the stories that are going on here. So making sure you don't give away your rights there is essential as well.

Right.

So what's next for you? So you were talking about some things that are going to happen Next year you're going to do a writer's workshop. What's next for the podcast for the ALZ Authors Network?

Right now we're working on a really terrific project with Larry Smith from six word memoir. And the idea is to tell your life story in six words.

I love that idea. It's like a haiku.

Yeah, it's crazy. It is. And people go, what? Can't do that. It's like, yeah, you can. And it's not that hard. And once you get start, get started, you'll. You won't stop. You'll be able to, you'll be able to figure it out quickly. So I worked with him. It took me a year to get this off the ground. I didn't tell anybody. It was my little secret until I had to go from him and everything in place and announced it to my partners. They look, what are you talking about? So anyway, what we're doing is collecting stories and it's not just from the authors. It's from anybody in Alzheimer's dementia world to talk about their dementia journey. One of the questions is what I wish I learned about Alzheimer's and dementia that I wish I knew that I didn't find out until later or something. Something like that. And another one is like, what's one takeaway from my Alzheimer's and dementia journey? So it's to share information with people in a very short format and we've collected about a hundred or so stories now and the goal is to create a book and then the book will become a source of income.

Well, I think that's fantastic. I also think that you've got an amazing social media program right there that is just to raise awareness for the owl's authors podcast for your website, for the whole thing like that. I can see killing it on TikTok and Instagram and like all the right places for that. You know, another really interesting place that we find really works well for specifically this area and authors in general is quotes on Pinterest. Inspirational like quote images on Pinterest. This would be a great place to have an entire board on these six minute memoirs or six word memoirs, rather like. That would be so cool. I think that would be really amazing.

Yeah. I'm actually looking for a volunteer to help us with the Pinterest page because, you know, just having the book covers on there would be great.

Yeah. Just even having that. Yeah. Well, we run a. I think we have in the feed your brand the of sister podcast to Binge Factor. We did a whole. Both a workshop that was on Pinterest and a discussion of what was working for us on Pinterest. And I know we'll do it again next year as well, so. Because we have a whole nother year of data on it. So we do try to cover Pinterest pretty frequently through there. So maybe we want to at least check those out in the meantime to help you find someone. But yeah, it's just I think that idea of like anything you can do that is bringing and growing your platform is benefiting all involved and it's going to bring you donors. So this is the one thing, our personal connection. My husband, I going to say that this is our fear. Like he has a fear that he is going to have Alzheimer's like his grandmother and like it's. He's so scared of it. And I think that that in itself breeds this opportunity for donors that just come out of nowhere and say, this has been burning in me and I want to give. They hear one of these stories and they're I want to give. They see one of those six word memoirs and it touches them to the experience they had with their grandparents or whatever that might be and they give. And so making sure that that tie in to where you can give is so essential to having one platform when you're doing it disparately through every single author separately. That doesn't work as well as you creating this consolidated resource for it.

Right. We say if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others. It's an old African proverb. It speaks to what we're trying to do.

It so does. Well, is there anything that our audience could learn from what you've done that you think was successful or things that you wish you did differently?

I think that I'm really fortunate in the fact that I have a built in audience because that's something I get all the time, is how do you find your guests? And I'm like, I have people banging on my door every week. Every other week we get a new one. There's a new author every other week and a podcast in between. So having that built in audience has really been helpful. So building that network up, it's easier than starting from scratch. I'm not concerned about finding a great guest because I have so many that I can pick from. And you definitely want. Yeah, they all wanted to get out there and tell their story and promote themselves. So it's a win, win for everybody.

Well, yeah, I mean it's built into the way your platform, your platform's gonna give them publicity and visibility through the podcast. It's gonna create blog posts. It's gonna create all of these kind of models of things. So it's already built into your whole system of what really makes the engine of the podcast run for everybody.

And I have a lot of great partners. There are six of us on the management team, and then we have another six or so volunteers performing different functions, and some bigger than others. And we've been together three of the first three core members since 2015, and the others, the most recent one, joined us in 2019. But, I mean, these people who get up every morning and they work and they do something related to ALLS authors every day, and we're in constant communication with each other. We use slack, and we're just going all day long. I've never met Susan. She came to us in 2019. I've only met my other partners in person once or twice. So we don't even have that. Everybody's spread across the country, and we just are all committed to this one cause, and we've all been touched by this experience, and we believe that it was our lost loved ones who have put us all together to do this job.

Oh, that's beautiful and wonderful. Like, you created lasting friendships and impact through what you've been building.

The sisters we call ourselves. I love that roll sisters, everybody. We all, you know, because we had all had a tragic experience, and that.

Binds people together in a great way to create impact and vision and social good.

Well, you said your husband is terrified of Alzheimer's, but can read some of our books, and you'll find that people will.

That's what I was thinking. Yeah, exactly.

Okay. It's not all doom and gloom. And, you know, a diagnosis doesn't mean the end of your life. You could die from something else in the meantime. But most people living with dementia, they learn how to live well, and they're trying to dispel that stigma. And that's part of our goal, is to dispel the stigma that people, you know, they still have something to offer. They're no different than they were the day before the diagnosis. They'll tell you.

Yeah. And I think that that's so interesting. Like, it is this thing that because of the age he was when it happened, and because we're the oldest grandchildren, both of us, on our. We're the oldest children, the oldest grandchildren. So it became. Our help and assistance became necessary. And. But having watched how it happened at the early stages was frightening. I think to him that it could go so quickly. And I think that it was just one of those things that left such an impression on him and think also just you're. Everyone's a different person. But his creative mind is something that is so essential to who he believes he is. And the idea that that might disappear on him is frightening. Right. Right when he might have a chance to relax and enjoy it. Like that scares him. And so it's understandable. And so it's been one of those things where we're always like, paying attention to what's going on in research and paying attention to what's happening, you know, in Alzheimer's in general, because it matters.

For some people, dementia makes the creativity.

Well, that's good to know. I might have to read that book.

People who are writing art, drawing, painting, creating, doing photography work, they never did it before. They never did anything like that until after they were diagnosed. It's unbelievable.

We put Tom's grandmother into an assisted living center that's really near us. So we moved them from Savannah, Georgia up to Providence, Rhode island, where we were living and put them near us because we were the only ones with. We worked for ourselves. So it was a little bit easier for us than to help than anyone else. And it was like right at the corner, literally. We had a five year old at the time, but the assisted living center did all the heavy lifting. Like, we didn't. And it had. Because his grandfather and grandmother were together and it had an assisted living separated section for an Alzheimer's. And so it was pretty progressive at the time because this is like the late 90s. And so they had their separated so they could be together now before she progressed to a stage at which they couldn't and they had to separate her into its own, the Alzheimer's area. So we looked at that and. And it made a difference, I think. It kept her. And they used to have run these art classes and because Rhode Island. Providence is Rhode island school design. And that's where Tom and I went. It was like they would bring in these creatives and they would run these beautiful art classes. And I remember her loving it. And she had a really creative mind. She would make these beautiful frames that were really detailed and she as much lost her as agility in her hands before she, you know, lost her mind completely there. So that probably happened first. But I remember her doing that and then loving it. And it was always a good day. The day she was being creative.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, well, thank you so much for sharing all these stories.

Thank you for everything.

Yeah. Bringing these messages out, bringing this podcast out, and really creating a vehicle for helping these authors understand the power of the platform and the power of. Of collaborating together. You've just created something so wonderful here. And so if there's anything our audience can do for you, they're going to be able to find you in the blog post for this episode@thebingefactor.com and they need to reach out because Marianne and her team are doing this all alone. And they are all together, but still on their own with no funding. And everything is supported through the donations to the organization. So you'll be able to reach them directly through the blog. Blog post on for this episode. So thanks everyone for listening and Maryanne, thank you for being here and for bringing alt authors untangling Alzheimer's and dementia to the world.

Thank you so much. I appreciate your time.

I think there was so much here in Marianne's interview and us talking about the way ALZ authors like bands together, and there's so much to a guesting strategy that's working for them. There's the journaling and blogging standpoint that's working for them. There's just so much of this idea of growing this audience and then the idea of banding together. Why not podcast with a couple of other people in a niche, right? It doesn't have to be a network that you're completely controlling in this particular case, and you don't always have to be the host. Right. There's some really interesting ideas to really diving down and working with others collaboratively within your niche. And I think you can get really inspired by ALZ authors and the way that they handle things there. So. So check out the show, Check out Marianne Shouko and everything that they're doing over there. And come to the blog post for this episode@the bingefactor.com so you can connect up with everyone. I look forward to bringing you other interesting ideas and other interesting podcast hosts next time here on the Binge Factor.

You've been listening to the Binge Fact. For more information on podcasting and video casting success tips and tactics, please go to thebingefactor.com and be sure to listen to our other show for podcasters called Feed you'd brand. If you'd like to be interviewed on this show as well as featured in Tracy's column, please go to thebingefactor.com guest and apply.

Sam.