58. Reviving a Dead Book (Case Study #4)

Welcome to the Book Marketing Show Podcast, where each week we'll show you exactly how to sell more books and have fun doing it. And now, your host, Dave Chesson. Hey guys, welcome back to the Book Marketing Show podcast. I'm Dave Chesson and I'm so glad you're here. I'm here to help you learn advanced book marketing so that you can get your book in front of the right people.

Now, today's episode, we're going to be doing another one of the fan favorite, Reviving a Deadbook Case Study. Now, in the Reviving Deadbook Case Studies, what we do is we find authors... where they had had a book that they poured their heart and soul into, they put it out there, and it failed. Now, the coolest part about this is two parts. Number one is identifying when a book should be revived.

And then specifically, what did they do differently in order to turn it into a success? The uniqueness of the Reviving a Dead book series is that it shows and proves that you could have a great book. But without the right marketing, it will fail. But when you take that same book and you apply some of the things you're learning from the Book Marketing Show podcast, you can see results.

Now, in today's episode, this one's going to be really unique because I found somebody who almost displays three distinct phases of the book writer's journey. The first phase for our guest, Stuart. is that he was a college kid, he wrote a book, didn't know what he was doing, and it failed, okay? Now... That seems like our typical. However, though, what's unique about the story was he decided that that book wasn't worth reviving.

Instead, though, later on in his career, he did another book in a completely different genre. And this time he decided that it was worth reviving. So now we get to see a difference between when it wasn't worth reviving and when it was. But the coolest part was all the things that he learned in marketing got him access to become a top book marketer. He's actually working for publishing companies and doing AMS ads and helping.

them to revive. And in our third phase, we get to hear about how he applied his skill sets to a book that a publishing company had owned that did horrible. How he changed it, corrected it, and then did a bit of marketing and got it to where it was bringing them an income when it hadn't in almost five years. So three phases from this.

episode. And yes, this is a bit longer than our normal, but it is worth every second. So with that, let's go ahead and bring on our guest and hear all about his decisions, what he did, and what he would do differently. All right, guys, I'm here with Stuart Thamen, who is a phenomenal writer. I'm not gonna lie. I actually just checked out one of his latest books on Audible. And as you guys all know.

Yes, I am an audible guy. So I'm reading Respawn, an epic fantasy lit RPG. So Stuart, thank you so much for coming on to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Now, Stuart, before we get into the question, I got to ask you, what is your definition of lit RPG? Because let me tell you, I feel like I've been on a firing range before by telling my definition. Yeah, so for me, it's sort of the same firing line feel there. I consider lit RPG to be pretty much anything with a very strong game element.

That game element might be stats and leveling and experience points, or it might be dungeon running and raids and magic gear and just the characters thinking about the game. So sort of a broad spectrum for me. I like all sorts of game lit and lit RPG. And honestly, I'm not attached to the stats and the abilities and the talent trees and that kind of thing like a lot of books, really.

hammer down on that aspect of it for me as long as the characters are thinking about their world in a lit rpg setting and in a gamified way then to me that's enough to be a lit rpg

I completely agree with you. There are many that do, but I am totally with that definition. Now, one of the things I love most about your story is you made a transition. You had a book. And it wasn't exactly working. And then you pivoted to a new genre. Can you take us through that process of what happened with that first book and why you decided to move to a genre and leave the book to die?

Yeah, so my story in publishing is really kind of strange, I think. I started writing simply because I couldn't find a job after college, and I had a lot of free time on my hands. I like to read books, so I figured... I'd give my hand at writing my own and I wrote for NaNoWriMo, did the 30 day contest, finished my like 55,000 word manuscript or something like that. So pretty short novel, finished it in the 30 days, was super happy with it.

Basically, then I was just talking to one of my friends from college about what I'd done. And his sister at the time was working as an editor for a very small publisher that actually ended up turning out to be more or less a vanity press up in Michigan.

Sent them the book. They liked it, all that kind of thing. They signed me to a contract that I don't even think I read. And I was 21 years old or 22 years old, something like that. And I thought like, holy shit, I'm getting published. My book's going to be in all these stores and all that stuff. They tossed it up on Amazon and just self-published it themselves with a royalty agreement for me.

The cover was absolutely terrible. The font on it was so bad. They published a 55,000 word novel in a six by nine trade paperback size, which just looked like a 110 page pamphlet. It had no back cover even on it, no publisher markings or logos or any of that crap. And it did horribly, as expected. They didn't really market it at all.

I think total in the five year contract I had with them, I made about 200 bucks off that novel, which is pretty weak. Finally, then about six months or so after that one was. sort of taken by that publisher, I decided to switch gears because it really it was a combination of the publisher wasn't very good. And I wasn't very good at writing a thriller. It was a weird, wonky plot thriller.

It just objectively was a bad novel. And I switched into fantasy, but I still didn't know anything. And I did my first two fantasy novels in the Gobblemore series really without. knowing what i was doing i had a friend who's a good artist he wasn't great he was a good artist and he did my covers i liked him at the time because i wasn't really involved with the writing community i wasn't getting feedback from anyone else i wasn't posting things on

read it to see what people liked or didn't like or doing any kind of market research whatsoever. And my novels did okay. And I actually pulled up my historical data from kdp here and my first one came out in january of 2013 my first fantasy novel and it sold 18 copies in its first month seven copies in its second

And then went nine months without a sale. So it was pretty abysmal. I had no idea what I was doing. And I still wasn't really happy where I was with my day job or anything like that. I'd finally found some employment. I didn't really like it at all and decided that I really wanted books to be at least a huge chunk of my career.

and made a shift to becoming active on all the online sites, all the message boards, Reddit especially, joining as many author groups as I could, trying to learn a bunch of things. And when the third book came out, I ended up redoing the entire series, re-editing, rewriting it, got an omnibus edition together, got some really killer cover art, and really have been off to the races since then.

And I thought for probably about two years, I debated with the idea of whether or not I would take Vatican Massacre back at the end of its five year contract and see if I could get that one up to speed and get it up to the quality that I expect. And in the end, it honestly, the time it would take to really rewrite the novel, change the ending, write probably another 25,000 words into the novel, get a new cover, get new editing, formatting, all that jazz.

It's more economical to just keep writing the other stuff, the fantasy that I know I can sell because I know I'm better at it and make that transition from really knowing nothing to devoting hours and hours of my day every single day.

to learning about the industry and that's really what i had to do for probably at least a year was every day i would spend a minimum of probably two hours reading blogs, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos, all of it about indie book sales, indie book writing, indie book marketing, and really just diving into

the entire world of publishing and trying to figure out what I was going to do and figure out how to make all those strategies and tips that I'd read work for me. It's paid off so far, so pretty happy with it. All right, so let's step back. The first book you had went through a publisher and they totally botched it up. Now, at this point, you were in, what genre was it?

I don't know. It's like half religious fiction, half thriller. Okay. Kind of a Dan Brown kind of thing, but without the quality. Okay. Why did you decide that as your first? I wish I could go back and change that decision. Though writing a bad novel that's not fantasy is probably actually a godsend because then it may be better at fantasy. The girl I was dating at the time was really into writing and she wanted to do NaNoWriMo. And since I was unemployed, I was like, well, I'll do it too.

I literally sat down at the keyboard and I wrote the prologue in a couple hours, maybe a 2000 word prologue. And that's just what came out. I had absolutely no plan. And now I plan everything. There's actually two notebooks sitting right next to me at this very moment that are full of my novel plans and outlines. Nice. I learned from that as well. All right. So.

You had decided with this book, you published it and everything like that. But then after that one kind of bombed and you decided to do something on your own, why the move to fantasy? What actually spurred the entire novel idea, like I've always been a fantasy reader. Honestly, I read everything. Just I'll read some romance every now and then I read thrillers, sci fi horror, a lot of horror.

all sorts of things. I read a lot of nonfiction as well. I've always liked fantasy a lot. And there's really just two things that were the catalyst. One was reading an AMA on Reddit from David Dalglish, who had read. five of his books and really liked them the half-orc series a fantastic fantastic fantasy series

And I was reading his AMA. I actually asked him a couple of questions on it, too, which is pretty cool. And he said that the whole reason why he started writing and why he started writing a lot, because he's extremely prolific and probably writes 10,000 words a day. And he said he was working at the time at a drive through window at a fast food restaurant. He was like 30 years old. And he just thought to himself, he's smarter than that. And that's not the life he wanted for himself.

I thought to myself, you know, hell, if this guy's working fast food restaurant, I've got two college degrees, like I'd consider myself a smart guy or whatever. Why don't I do this? And I started writing fantasy. And the novel idea came from at the time I was working at a restaurant. And one of the products they sold on the menu is an appetizer called Gravlox, which is salmon, like a peppered salmon on crackers.

And I saw the name and I just thought to myself, that'd be a cool name for a goblin. And then immediately after that, I was like, why don't I write a fantasy from the perspective of a goblin? They're always the shitty bad guys that get killed everywhere. Why don't I make them the good guys that are really the masterminds?

And that's my entire Goblin Wars series. And it just came right out of that. Nice. One of the things I love most about what you were talking about on this move towards fantasy was that... At that point, you start investing like two hours a day to learn and immerse yourself into not only the marketing, but also understanding your genre and study. Learning the tropes. The tropes, yes.

And I think that's a really big part that a lot of authors miss is that they're like, I just want to write the book. And I mean, there's a lot of other complaints. I tried that. Yeah. I just want to write the book. And the other thing too, is that I hear from authors all the time is I just want to write the book. And then if I get a publisher, everything will work out. Well, again, we kind of.

Not exactly. Thinking about it in the wrong direction. You're starting at the top and then trying to build a foundation after you've already got the top half of your skyscraper. That's never going to work. Right. Physics do not agree. Okay, so you published your first book in the fantasy area, and again, Goblin Wars, correct? Yeah, the first book of the Goblin Wars. And it didn't do well.

But you used all the stuff that you had learned. You made a better cover, better blurbs, and then you had a marketing plan implemented. And you had said something that I was kind of curious about. You said that you added 25,000 words. I needed to if I was going to rewrite Vatican Massacre. Oh, in that one. OK. Yeah. Goblin Wars. Each novel is around 80, 85,000. So OK. It was a good. It was a little short. Yeah. Yeah.

good size. It didn't need it. So you didn't change any of the content. All you did was repackage and then actually market. I did actually end up rewriting the first book of the series. So the first book of the Goblin War series, I did. The prologue to that one was really bad because I was trying to tell the reader what I was trying to do instead of just doing it. And I see that error a lot.

especially really new writers. And I rewrote at least the first half like significantly and then just polished up the second half a little bit and then carried what I had learned through that process into books two and three and the novella that's out now.

And that helped a lot, helped tremendously, because especially in the beginning of a series, you have to start strong or you're never going to get them for books two and three. But with books two, you had already learned enough. And so you didn't need to change much to book two. No, but you just got recovered and reformatted. Got it. All right, so then what did it look like after you had recovered, reformatted, and remarketed the books?

It went from looking like, oh, this guy likes to write some fantasy stories and look at that, he's self-published. And it was like an instant transformation when I went from doing conventions and signings and shows with the old covers.

to the new products. And then with the new ones, it went from people coming up and they're like, yeah, these are professional fantasy books that could be from, you know, Tor or Orbit or Random or whatever it is. They really compete with all the other stuff on the shelf at a bookstore. and look just like it. And the boon for online sales, I mean, I'm looking at my historical chart right now on my second monitor, and I had never even broken 100 sales in a month.

until I recovered and everything. And now that's sort of like my minimum baseline. If I don't have a hundred sales, like I'm doing something really wrong or I've been out of town for a month. That's awesome. And to the listeners out there, let me tell you, his covers are awesome. I remember the first time I checked your website and I saw that first book cover for The Goblin Wars. I was like...

Dang, that looks legit. Yeah, I've got that on a big canvas painting that I take to different conventions and whatnot. And I set that up as the poll to get people to come over and start talking about books. And it works like a charm. That's a really good way of thinking about it because I'm not going to lie. Like that's a cool enough picture that I would totally put it on my wall, especially as a fantasy fan. I do have rights from the artist and I don't sell many of them.

But I sell a couple of the canvases at big shows and stuff and people come over. And the first thing they always want to know is did I paint it? And my artistic skills end it like writing my name. But. I always tell people a little bit about the artist and then it's like, yeah, and here's the book that this is the art and people love it. And they winged dude with the sword that does it for them. Yeah. I love that. Not going to lie. It's beautiful.

And it's funny is, is that especially when authors find like ridiculously cool. book cover designers that kind of keep it like a secret. But would you mind sharing with listeners who you use? Yeah, I share all my professionals I work with, editing, covers, formatting, whatever it is. I just want other people to succeed as well. All my covers now are done by J. Caleb Clark from J. Caleb Design.

The coolest thing about all the Jay Caleb covers, he does absolutely glorious commissions, of course, and most of my stuff has been commissions. But if you look at the Killstreak Respawn cover, that was actually a pre-made cover that he made. And when he does premades, I think it's every Sunday and Wednesday. So he does, I think, two premades a week. He posts them to his Facebook page as a first-come, first-served for $100. So the covers are very reasonably priced. Honestly, they're cheap.

And he posts them up. And if he just watches Facebook like a hawk, and I have it set up to give me alerts on my phone, it pushes them right to me. And I check it out. And I bought several covers already that it's like, I haven't written this book yet, nor have I planned it out. but I needed that cover because it's perfect. For $100 for a pre-made, you're losing money not buying it. So really can't say enough about Jay Caleb. He's awesome.

And to the listeners, that is jcalebdesign.com. And what he's talking about with the pre-made book covers, it's insane. Once you've got a great artist who can create a genre-specific book cover and they do this... It's like a free for all. It's like Black Friday at Walmart at four in the morning when that thing goes live. Cause I mean, everybody's trying to. Get it immediately. So he did one of those where he posted 30 at once and it was a melee.

I've been a part of some in the sci-fi world. It was like before I could even click to buy, it was like gone. I was like, gotta be kidding me. The one I wanted, I was 11 minutes late because I was out of the house and I was 11 minutes late getting back to his website.

And the one I really wanted was already gone. And it's like, oh, it's just killing me. I know. The worst part is when you can see what's already been bought and you're like, I was only here earlier. I could write novel after novel with these covers. absolutely that's

That's really awesome. I love how in this story, we as listeners have been able to hear about the fact that you ultimately decided that this wasn't the genre for you. You chose a genre. It's a hard decision to make. Yeah, I can imagine. you chose that genre you hunkered down you invested time and energy into truly understanding that genre you launched a book it didn't do well

And that's a key part. I like for authors to understand that, that we all fail forward. It takes years to really progress. It's a slow grind. And yet, after all of that, you were able to develop enough skills and understanding to turn around, take that book, tweak it a little bit, repackage it, send it off, and then... reap the benefits but what's even cooler about your story though is that from all of these things you learned you gain something called a skill

that companies and authors pay you a lot of money in order to be able to do that for them. Would you mind kind of sharing a little bit of that aftermath and what that's like? Yeah, for sure. Really, it all stems from a personal philosophy that I honestly don't know when I picked up. Maybe probably sometime in high school, I think, where I just sat down and I was a gamer and everything. A lot of people just have that.

stereotype in their mind that gamers are lazy and dumb and i hate that stereotype because anyone can be lazy and dumb it's not just gamers but it's something that everybody struggles with is being lazy and it's easy to do and Probably sometime in high school. I think I just heard that stereotype so many times. And it was like I was in all honors classes and everything, spoke two languages in high school. And I worked my ass off to really.

honed my mind and I just had the idea that every single day no matter where I am if I'm on vacation if I'm traveling for work or doing whatever it is I'm doing every single day I want to spend at least an hour acquiring a skill making myself more marketable just learning something new because I want to learn it or anything like that and so when really my first two books were complete failures I just thought to myself well I just need to apply

my normal work ethic and philosophy to book marketing. And if I start every single day for an hour or two a day, learning marketing, writing.

all these techniques, strategies, tips, whatever it is, if I spend that two hours a day and I really learn just like you would be going to school and I took notes, I've got tons and tons of note documents saved on Google Drive of just... stuff that i needed to write down and i've been doing that really for now at least four or five years and i still do and it's just every single day hitting the grindstone learning the things and then

figuring out how to incorporate all the things that I learn into new marketing plans and to rebranding myself. And just this summer, I had started on Facebook ads because I'd never really experimented with it before. I got a couple of Facebook ad e-books for how to do it kind of things. The Mark Dawson Facebook course and sat down. It was just two hours a day. My publisher even told me and he was like, hey.

If you learn Facebook ads and he was looking for people and the other employees and whatnot, and he's saying like, hey, we need somebody to start taking on the Facebook ads full time and start running these. And I just told him, I'm like, you give me two months and I'll do it for you all the time.

And that's about what it was. Two months later, I was like, okay, I'm confident. I've run a few tests on my own. My first test, I lost $350 and made zero sales. My second test, I spent 40 bucks and brought in over 100. And it's been just going in a positive direction since then. And it was really just give me two months, I'll work at it hard and I will acquire this skill because I want to do it. And you really have to have, especially in writing, because it's such a long, drawn out process.

You have to have that mentality of just every day getting closer and closer to your goals, even if it's going to take a decade. And that's hard for a lot of people to really hunker down and grasp, I think. Another thing I want to point out on this is that when you did that first Facebook test,

and you lost $350. You didn't quit. You didn't jump out of the cold pool and be like, no, I'm done, I'm done. You stayed in, and you got warmed up to it. That's a lot of money. That's right, but you failed forward. Yeah. Again, another thing I just want to be into the listeners right now. It's a failing forward moment because you took, you learned and you applied and you continued. Sometimes some authors will take a lot longer.

I remember when I first started doing book marketing, I saw people who were like totally surpassing me. And I'm frustrated because I'm like, you got to be kidding me. It's like they know the secret. You know what the secret was? They just got it a little bit sooner. And there's always luck too. But one thing I will say is the people who don't quit, the ones that stick and that they perform, they will get it. Yeah. It's just the people who feel very frustrated are the ones that...

Try something, it fails. They pivot to something else. They try it, it fails. They pivot to something and they just keep pivoting all over the place and they never give anything enough time to develop and then treat it like a skill and learn and grow. So you talked about Facebook and you also do AMS ads, correct?

Yeah, lots of AMS. Is that kind of the favorite? Yeah, it's what I started on learning. And it was one of my friends, a publisher out in California named Bobby Kim. He runs Butterfly Press or Butterfly Publications, something with a butterfly in it. I don't remember the name. Actually, I was talking to him one day and I was like, I was actually just complaining saying that, man, I've been grinding on these AMS ads. They just take so damn long to make. I'm really not making any headway.

And he was like, hey, try KDP Rocket and make like 10 ads. Do this where you're testing specific ad copy with the same keyword sets. You're doing your A-B testing. And he's like, do that. Give it a couple of weeks. Tell me what happens. And I did that. I gave it a couple of weeks and then I sent him a message and I'm like, you're the absolute best. This works wonderfully. And now I figured out how to do it. And from there, it was fine tuning and honing that skill. But I went from.

My best ACOS was probably two or three hundred percent to now getting them around 10 to 20 percent. That's really where you want to be anyways. So awesome. Yeah. More effective and efficient. Yeah, I really like AMS. And honestly, I just think their platform is about a thousand times better than Facebook is a Facebook platform just sucks. It's so wonky and technical and confusing and I hate it.

For the listeners, we had episode 31 where it was me and Johnny Andrews. And we were talking about I was the AMS guy and Johnny Andrews was the Facebook guy. But one of the things that we got out of that particular episode, and be sure to check it out, guys, was that... With Facebook ads, you have to convince the person on Facebook to stop what they're doing, stop watching the cat videos, and decide that they want to buy a book. Then you also have to get them to decide that they buy your book.

That's a lot of work. It's an extra step. Yeah. It's a hell of a lot of marketing. I think convincing somebody to buy a book right now is harder than convincing someone who's already decided they want to buy a book. to buy your book. And I think that's the biggest difference between Facebook and AMS. AMS, I just got to snipe them and say, no, no, no, don't buy that one, buy my book. And that's infinitely easier on a marketing side.

One of the things I want the listeners to know is I actually came across you on Reddit. I read one of your Reddit posts where you were talking about a book that you were actually working on at the time with AMS sales. Would you mind jumping in a little bit into that?

Yeah, so my publisher's been around for, I don't know, at least 10 years, quite a while, probably 15, 20, something like that. For a small press, that's kind of unheard of because a lot of small presses do very poorly and are very poorly managed and go downhill. We had a large backlog from when the current owner, Tony Acre, a bestselling author in his own right, had bought it from a previous owner.

And the previous owner was kind of on that downhill path. And Tony bought the press and he bought a huge backlog of contracts on probably 100 different books or so. And one day, Tony and I were just talking about ideas for the press. And it was like, hey, we barely have any fantasy. It was like me, Richard Knack, who writes all the World of Warcraft fantasy, and Michael Liguori, who writes some really good Asian style fantasy. And we're pretty much it. And we're thinking.

Let's look at some of the backlog stuff. These contracts have just been sitting here for a couple of years. And if there's one that I think is well-written, cool plot, whatever, let's try to pull it into the 21st century, so to speak, and get it selling. And Samurai Wind was the one that we picked and or that I picked, I guess. It was originally entitled Ukushima, which is the name of a specific transport ship in World War Two from the Japanese Navy that few people are ever going to know.

No one knows what that word means. Or how to spell. And the cover was, I don't know, maybe a 6 out of 10. It wasn't great. It wasn't really marketable. The title is just bad. The blurb was extremely long and basically told the entire plot of the whole novel. And so I took the book. We renegotiated that guy's contract to get him down for another couple of years.

And we retitled it Samurai Wind and we rebranded it as a portal fantasy because that's what it was. And they were trying to market it in the old Hydra as sort of a historical fantasy kind of thing. We rebranded it as Portal Fantasy. We got a new cover, new title. And I think all in all, we spent on the new production of it less than 50 bucks. It was probably around 40 to get everything.

And we brought it to life. We slapped it up there and we were in the process of working out a marketing plan for it. And in the process of doing that, the book was available. And I expected. Maybe it's one sale as probably the author buys another copy or something. I don't know.

And all of a sudden, like the first day it was up, it sold like six or seven copies. And I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. And then the next day, it was like another six or seven day after that. And it just kept on going at a handful of copies every day. And I finally checked the paperbacks. stats and i'm like wow this has sold 130 paperbacks or something like that it sold a bunch and i was like that's pretty cool and so we started designing some ams ads for it right away

And had really gotten the novel to take off just with an easy rebrand. And that novel had been out for at least four or five years when we rebranded it. And the rebranding really only took, I think it was about $40. The cover was like... $28 and the rest was in some obscure research and stuff like that and just a minor update to the covers and whatnot.

And it was a super easy way to take that dead novel that hadn't moved a copy in years. And we brought it into the real world and got it up to selling quality. And then through the use of the AMS ads have really gotten it to take off. I'm very excited about that. That's awesome. And the cover is great. I think you guys did a great. Yeah, it's got a good samurai feel. I can see how it wasn't like.

a super expensive cover, but it really personifies perfect for what it is. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I got a little Samurai Jack feel from it as well. Yep. And I love Samurai Jack. Actually the first. reiteration of the redone cover was exactly that but in the sun above the samurai there's no japanese zero and the cover artist actually

After she sent the first one back and she was like, hey, what do you think of this? I hadn't gotten a chance to respond to it yet. And she sent back another one. She just goes, no, no, no. Screw that first one. This is your cover. And it had the zero added to the sun. And I just sent back. I'm like, yeah, you're right. Like always. Perfect. That's what we'll take.

No, I love that because you're not expecting to see a zero Japanese airplane with a straight up Tokugawa air samurai standing there. It tells you what you get. Yeah. Exactly. And that's what I love about the symbiotic relationship of the title to the cover to the blurb, which we talk about a lot on this podcast.

Guys, make sure to check out the show notes. I will have images of the covers as well as links to the books that we talked about in this episode. But Stuart, I just want to say it was amazing to hear your story because this is really unique. Because Stuart went from starting to failing forward to taking his book, going in a new direction in genre, learning, going back and applying what he learned to his books, and then gaining success. But more importantly, becoming...

So well versed in creating such a skill out of this that now he works on other books with publishing companies and it just helps to take.

book after book in the dead status and bring it back to life so stewart thank you so much for coming on to the show this has been a real delight and i feel like we could talk lit rpg oh yeah I'm a big talker. I can go for hours and hours. Well, awesome. Well, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you.

While there was a lot that we could take from these three different phases of Stuart's book writing world, I want to highlight some of the things that I think are incredibly important for authors to understand. Now, Stuart started off writing his book in sort of a...

passion project, okay? He realized that it wasn't in his element, and I thought it was very incredibly strong of him to just pivot to a completely new genre that felt more in line with what he wanted to do as well as some of the things he learned. But what I love most is that throughout his story, you hear what I call the failing forward moments.

He failed for it. He didn't quit. He learned from mistakes and he came back and he applied them and he improved his writing and therefore improved his results. Another thing that I love about this is he looked at a lot of the things he did as building skill. His Facebook ads, it didn't go well the first time. That happens, but he stuck with it. More importantly, he then even grew into AMS ads. And from there, he was able to see an even bigger world and use that skill.

And that's what landed him jobs as well as giving him opportunities to revive other people's books. So we can see kind of a complete hero's journey, if we will, in the writer's world. Stewart starting... being set on a path, being guided, finding some opportunities, growing in his skill and overcoming.

the obstacles before him and now seeing what he sees. And yes, I did read that book and it is awesome. I'm now starting up on the Goblin Wars, which was the one we were talking about that has this super cool cover. Not going to lie. It's really awesome.

Be sure that if you need any of the information, come back to the show notes where we will have all the pictures of all the cool things we were talking about, as well as the book covers and some of the tips and tricks that he used. And with that, I'm Dave Chesson of the Book Marketing Show podcast. signing off. Cheers.