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Overview
Jake Brown is the author of 50+ books and creator/host of ABOUT THE AUTHORS TV. With over TWO MILLION viewers and counting since TUBI TV began airing Seasons 1 & 2 in the Spring of 2022, The Associated Press recently spotlighted that ABOUT THE AUTHORS TV “has found an audience among both fans of the writers they profile on the show along with an aspiring crowd of wordsmiths just learning the craft.” The first-of-its-kind streaming television project, which Publisher’s Weekly has already reported, “features long-form interviews with best-selling authors across all genres,” along with promoting their new upcoming releases.
Book
Author TV
https://www.youtube.com/c/AbouttheAuthorsTV
Cathy’s Books:
Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Happy Place by Emily Henry
Pineapple Street by Jennie Jackson
Five-Star Weekend by Elin Hildebrand
Only Love can Hurt Like This by Paige Toon
The Summer of Songbirds by Kristy Woodson Harvey
YouTube
Transcript
So today, and then I’ve got a great Of author on my podcast. He’s got some great pictures of stuff in the background. This is Jake Brown. Jake, how are you doing today?
Jake: Great. Thanks for having us. Thank was me, I should say, in the show by extension. Great.
Stephen: So is that really signed by heart?
Jake: Yeah that’s, I co-wrote that book with them years and years ago. Bless their hearts in two thou back in 2006 and seven. Wow. And then I met them in 2009 and they signed that and comically, I was sitting there in the Ryman’s dressing room waiting to meet them, and I was so nervous.
As understandably anyone who grew up on heart would be that they would like the book too. Cause this is my first time hearing. Did they like it? Did they hate it? And Alison Krause and her husband are sitting there as well, and I didn’t even know. I was polite. I talked to them. I, but I wasn’t like, oh, you’re al and it wasn’t that I ever get like that, but I was almost too passive.
So she leaves. And the cuz everyone else was getting, her, the manager for heart comes in and she goes, oh, it’s so nice you got along with Allison and her husband. And I felt like a jerk cuz they brought them out later on. She came out later on stage in, sang these dreams with Nancy Wilson.
But they’re, they were the sweetest, I wrote that book at a point in my career where It’s fair to say that I had written, authors, I’ve been doing this 25 years in 55 books. So at this point I’ve gone through peaks and valleys like everybody, but I had written mass market hip hop paperbacks for five straight years, and it was reaching a point where I either needed to.
In my career trajectory, I needed to start writing for bigger audiences, publishers, et cetera or not. And the Tupac Shakur State authorized a book through a fe shakur’s mother called Tupac in the studio that actually launched this series. And then Hart was the next to say yes to it. And that.
Put me on a different, that put me in a different league. And then that got me nice. An audience with Lemy and we wrote the Motorhead in the studio book, and so things just started rolling. So I hang it there because it has perpetually been like my good luck charm.
Stephen: Nice. We’re just jumping right into things and everybody listening.
It was probably like, okay Steve, shut up. Let Jake talk because he’s way more interesting,
Jake: but No, currently talking too much. I’m happy to answer any questions you have though.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. See what I would’ve done if I was hard knowing you were nervous if my agent said, Hey.
This guy’s really nervous or something. I would’ve come in and slammed the what the hell? Those book sucks. I can’t stand and just, messed with you. And then I would’ve told you how much I liked it. But that’s just me and that’s probably why I’m not in that position.
Jake: Only thing that was cool is Nancy Wilson told me that she had not only read it, but her kids had read it and Cameron Crow had read it, who at the time they were married and that, and growing up an influence.
The size. He was on me through fast times and say, say anything right and this kinda stuff. I was definitely definitely honored at that. Are you able to edit this? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Hey, gimme 30 seconds. I gotta one.
I got signed for this ups. Oh yeah. My bad. So one.
Stephen: Sorry about that. No, not a problem. Not a problem.
Jake: Yeah, man, so that, that kind of got things launched and then a few years later I had another opportunity to write a book with Joe Satriani, oh, his memo. It was a musical memoir, which I’m careful to say because at some point he will do his own.
I’m sure more. I was born in this date and, but we really Got into every, if you’re a fan of whether it’s, flying in a blue dream or surfing with the alien, the early stuff all the way through his more recent work, it doesn’t it, we did the paperback update. In 2017. So there’s a couple records past that, but you can really hear firsthand from him.
And one thing I started doing with these books that became a sort of key part of how I write books is I think first person narrative, if it’s gonna be like in Joe’s case, is really exciting for the fans. But if you can blend that, and it’s not me, I’m not the only one that does this, but I tried to do it a little bit.
But in the studio books, I talk to all the engineers, the producers, the song, the songwriters, the guitar players, the band members, past, present, whatever. To the degree the artist allows me. And we, and that’s been pretty thoroughly through that series. And we reconstruct every one of these records as you’re listening to them.
You can read along with pretty much every sound lyric, lick, drumbeat, et cetera, you hear. And that kind of, Echoed outward into this Kenny Aronoff book. The drummer Kenny Aronoff, he was John Lanham’s term in the eighties, probably got 200 number ones. I met him through the Satriani book. So what I mean is you also get opportunities where you meet people through that.
Led to this U s USA Today article. I have friend of here from Beyond the Beats in 2018 where I interviewed God, in that first book we had Lar Ulrich, Tommy Lee, Joey Kramer, the drummers from Aerosmith, Motley Crew, guns N Roses, Jane’s Addiction, foo Fighters Taylor Hawkins. Gimme a really elaborate one.
Red Hat Chili Peppers journey creds Clearwater Revival. It was just an incredible list. Smashing Pumpkins. So there’s been a kind of weird pattern throughout my. Music writing career where one project typically Initiates another. Initiates another Teddy Riley, legendary king of new Jack swing, inventor of that genre.
My prerogative, writer, producer, and that’s coming out. We hope at the end of this year or early next year, but it’s actually being shot right presently. So there’s a lot of these projects, gest date, sometimes over long periods. Sometimes you write them in, two or three years. Sometimes you write them in seven or eight years.
Sometimes you write them in a year. It just depends on the contract. But yeah, so all of that. Laid the groundwork for what I do now, which I can get into when you’d like. That natural songwriter series is right There is another one. So they just I profile all the songwriters on Music Row and chronicle the stories behind them and their songs that write all the country music hits that you hear on the radio for the most part.
So it’s been a very interesting definitely career.
Stephen: No, yeah, it sounds like it. So something you said, and I’m gonna jump on while we’re fresh for authors. You did a project, it led to the next project. It led to the next. Sometimes you hear this I’m just not getting anything that I like or what, sometimes you gotta get out, you gotta improve your odds.
You gotta get out there, do the do the work. And music’s that way too. Just sitting at home in your living room, waiting for that. Agent to call or that band or whatever. Sometimes I found a band I played with because I went to an open mic night and they were playing with, and they said, Hey, we’re, I was listening to ’em like, wow, these guys are pretty good.
I enjoy it. And they said, Hey, we’re looking for a basis. I went, Hey let’s talk if I hadn’t gone, so same thing with writing it. Anything creative always needs that.
Jake: Yeah, and there’s a, it’s called Always Be Writing as the rule. And, I ghost write on top of the 50 plus in my own catalog.
I’ve ghosted another 40 books, I think over the last, 10, 15 years just to pay bills. And if you, and then I’m writing scripts for the show when I’m not writing those. If you’re not writing. You’re just, you’re not a writer, right? And that’s just the cold, hard truth of it. They’re not. Now with that said, writer’s block, I don’t believe in writer’s block because a, so an example of a lot of the people I talked to for the show authors, and I’m sure that you do, they start in journalism.
You don’t, they don’t, editors don’t care if you’re not inspired people, word counted, deadline. You write it and deliver it. It’s the same thing with a book. If a publisher puts up a contract and they’re paying you in advance, To write a book. Write the book. Now that sounds overly simplified, but if you do it long enough, you get into the rudiments of that to be able, if you’re having a bad day with one chapter, you flip to another.
If you’re having a hard time with one character, work on another. If you’re having a time, timeline issues, one timeline work on the next. So there’s never an excuse to not be writing something, or if you’re not writing edit. Go over your own material again and again and again.
And if you’re having problems with it, think about it or listen to it on we get a lot of people that talk about the benefit now with technology and word even has, and Google has it too. You can have one of these deals where it reads to you out loud, right? You can hear so many things that you wouldn’t see reading when you hear something to know what, okay, and then maybe you just sat there that day and listened from an editing standpoint, and then you, okay, I fixed all these things.
Or this needed to go, it might lead you to a new door. So that theme is important because in 2020 I got stranded, like millions of people at home, and I had written this book. You see how thick that is? 600 page first country music producers guide of its kind had every one of the big guys and ladies all under one roof had their old backs stories, they hit stories behind their hits, et cetera.
We’re going out to promote and my publicist calls me and says, Barnes and Noble has called. The publisher. The publisher just called me book’s not coming out in physical because they’re closing all the stores. So in other words, everything we had planned for this could not be really done. And then Zoom came into the mix, I think like 3000 people had Zoom in February of 2020.
And 3 million people had it by April, right? Yeah. So by the time I was catching onto it in May, Four months into its big boom, it was already thank goodness established. And so we went out and did morning shows. We did a bunch of, a very long list of really nice, podcasts and all, a lot of ’em very new because it was like this new boom happening.
But also in the course of all of that, I said, I, for years have wanted to adapt the format of doing like what we’re doing or what I do with bands to authors and. Part of that, and I want to be very respectful of podcasts like yours, which allow this, but one of the things I ran into in 2020 that was really maddening when you’re trying to promote a book, you have a finite amount of time to do it in.
And a lot of the peers that I deal with ran into the same thing is because there was a big advent of new podcasts happening and publishers were just pushing everything they could out. You would wind up. For 10 minutes of 45 minutes or an hour talking about the book. And the other 50 minutes would be spent not on the book.
Often it would be spent talking about how different the podcast was from all its competitors where there is post-production, and that can be done in post, and then you can spend more time talking to the author and I get it, it was like a thing where people were all competing for the same listeners and it was a whole new thing.
So I took a lot from that campaign and things I thought podcast did really well and things that I wanted to do that I realized I couldn’t do in that format. But streaming television had just. It had been around, but it hadn’t really had that Tiger King thing kinda if that guy gets a streaming television thing, anybody should get one.
So it was like, okay, what if I could. Put together a TV show, which is really crazy sounding, where I have a set, which is about a mile from me in Hendersonville here in Nashville where I film. Nice. Yeah. And just start, and start formatting this around the idea of Episodic Lake streaming television, which is not, didn’t exist in the format of author interviewing authors.
Where we went over the whole career. And started like I do in the books with the musicians when we talk about childhood and go all the way up. Now, that’s not unique in the fact that like your podcasts or lots of other great podcasts talk with authors in the timeframes that, exist for that.
But sometimes, as you might be getting somebody on and all they can really talk about is that one book they’re promoting. You know what I mean? Whatever. So the idea here was that first of all, it was gonna only work of a streaming network, picked it up. And we initially had some potential with an Amazon thing, and then there was all of these really well-intentioned and really left-wing voting apparatuses, but their iPhones that were making documentaries and Amazon had a self.
Video publish kind of pipeline that Jeff Bezos just stopped. So there was no non-fiction content going to Amazon for a year. And that was probably really healthy just to let the content be more about, non-political things. But it also shut out like educational programming. It shut all these.
So we had to go out and pitch this. And I went ahead and financed a $30,000 production overhead out of my royalty checks for the year and anything I could go strike, built the set, started reaching out to authors like Brad Meltzer, sum Monk, Kidd. Some of the amazing people that signed on at first, Heather Graham, Catherine Colter, and I just started throwing it at the biggest names that I’d grown up reading that were the biggest influence on me because I thought, you know it, I wanna start big and see if I get any interest in this.
And because I was an author of 50 books as a host, I can talk, with them about process. And luckily it worked, man. So we’re over 700 authors in two years later. Seasons 1 0 2 got picked up. God blessed them by tv. B Television, tv. Tv. I saw that. Yeah. And there’s 54 episodes in seasons one and two.
There’s another 68 that are gonna be coming here in what we’re talking about, seasons three and four. And I actually I have a little blurb I can read you. It’s actually Yeah please. I’ve just been putting together the frustration with streaming is you get approved and then they accept it, but then it can take three to four weeks for it to gest date down into the viewing cycles or algorithms, however that works.
So I’ve been working on this press release, but. We put together with Seasons three and four, there’s the Oscar-Winning Martian basically says, if you’re interested in getting together with the creators of the Martian, the Lincoln Rhyme franchise, star Wars Bones, Indiana Jones, Trueblood Billion Dollar Box Office franchise, Rambo Shining Girls, Donny Brasco, the Goonies Poltergeist, Blonie Longmire Troll Hunters spike TV’s doing the Marshal from Kim Stanley Robinson happen.
Leonard Judy Moody. It goes on and on. And then you went, we went back in time to Sarah Poretsky and Erica jg pioneers that were doing this when nobody else was in variations of crime fiction. In Perret’s case. And in Erica Jong’s case, really fear of flying, launched the second help launched the second wave of feminism.
Joyce Car oes was like an absolute shock that opportunity came. And that’s what I mean so once word of mouth started getting out Between 2021 when I was producing 2022 when it launched, and just now 2023, we’ve had over 2 million viewers. And that’s just come between the YouTube channel and Tubi and that’s just all come from organic word of mouth.
Nice. Because the other thing that we got was absolutely no press. Nobody would cover the show. Nobody would give us any on the mainstream level of that. And it was really an eye-opening thing for me because quite honestly, you get a little bit insulated and comfortable. As a music biographer when you write books with famous bands because you get used to being on Right.
You know what I mean? I don’t mean that in a negative ego way, it’s just people call and they’re like, Hey, we’re doing it. Like music’s greatest mysteries. I’ve been lucky to be a cast member on that show for a few years now. Breaking the bands, you get these invitations and I don’t do a lot of them, but I do the ones that I think are really cool.
That’ll be to the fan bases I write for. But this was like guys. You had my last five books in parade. What do you mean? You’re not gonna give us even a little blurb? They were like, you’re the competition now, dude.
Stephen: You’re not our yeah, sorry to, if you didn’t realize this, there’s probably not people going to the Soone.
Oh my God. A Jake Brown book. Oh, who’s this heart man? I’m probably That’s not what they’re buying it for. No offense to you.
Jake: But what I mean is even in that regard though, Joe Satriani was the kindest press sharer I’ve ever done a book. Oh, that’s cool. I love doing that out to c b s, the Hollywood Reporter to anywhere, variety all kinds of magazines that he could have completely been like.
Yep. He was great. Let’s talk about me. And he, yes, he’s so generous. And so what I’m saying is that kind of thing. And then afterward with a lot of the bands, I’ve been fortunate, as sad as it is, like lemy passing, you get, you sometimes get brought in to do that talking head stuff because you worked with that person and maybe like you were maybe only one of a couple people that got lucky to, so all of that went away.
So we had to build this from the organic ground up. And you know what did it we were very blessed was the authors social media, Twitter. Post the election era really changed and became more organic and grassroots again, and there was a lot less of the stigma. Oh, you’re on Twitter trump’s on Twitter.
Just keeping it real. Whether you were prohi or against him, it just went, it so Twitter has been a lifeline for us on top of YouTube, which has been the absolute reason we are existent because what we do on the YouTube channel is we’ll do early premieres, we’ll do advanced sort of previews.
We’ll do promos, but we’re pumping out new author interaction every week. In terms of new authors we’re interviewing, even if we’re months away from filming, like their actual, I have a, the set I reshoot at, but we’re just really. Trying to keep an organic connection with the people watching the show that are fans of the authors that want to hear in length about their catalog.
Some of these episodes run two hours, some of them run Wow. An hour and 45 minute. And yeah. And my host clips are as clipped as they can be. So the majority of the time you’re spending are with the authors. That’s awesome. And I mentioned like seasons one and two, just as highlights. It was like TC Boyle, Karen Slaughter, Brad Meltzer and Ranken.
Scott Tau. Katherine Coulter. Heather Graham. Chris Baha, and John Le Squad. We had ley Bailey’s final televised interview before he passed. Wow. Career length. Yeah. John Douglas who created, they created a mine hunter over so it just, it continued within seasons. Three and four, I mentioned Joyce, Carol Otz, there’s Jeffrey Deaver, there’s Barry Eisler, there’s Craig Johnson from Longmire.
There’s all kinds of. Joe r Lansdale, she kenon Joe Pistone, like it was Donny Brasco who wrote a bunch of books.
Stephen: Yeah. I was looking on Tuby, I was going through the list. I was supposed to be watching a movie with my son, and I’m like, oh my gosh, I’m gonna be talking to this guy. And oh, look at these authors.
And he’s yeah, that’s great. Can we watch the movie now? I’m like, you don’t get it. This is like huge.
Jake: It’s been, yeah. And the thing that it’s been really rewarding about it is our fa our viewers range from teenagers. All the way up to retirees who are just starting to figure out they wanna write a book.
It’s an ageless profession. We are certainly not the first to say that As you figure talk about in your podcast, people start at all ages. They do a job, their kids are off to college, okay? They can finally write a book. Mom’s been at home, a very common story. Mom’s at home with kids and now she has some time and they go off to school or whatever it is that you get that little bit of time every day to write it leads to these kinds of careers and many, most.
95% of the people that we talked to. It wasn’t like a, oh, my dad was an author and I’m an actor. Or he was an actor. I’m an actor. Cuz there was no familial help. It was like every one of these people went through the same things that every day oth people trying to become authors do. And did, and the other thing that we really try to emphasize is like aspiring authors.
There’s a bible of advice in this show like I’m sure on your podcast. We try to pull as much of that out as we can about the everyday life of a writer. You might have a million seller book and it might be 10 years before you have another, and then you might just be writing for a living in between then.
And so there’s always kinds of things that we hear about, whether it’s agent good or bad, agent stories, editor stories whatever kind of writing someone did to break in that they maybe don’t wanna talk about, but we try to touch on to just glean from what they got out of it, that they took forward with them.
So the idea is that whether you’re a, a kid, you’re in your twenties, 30, 40, 50 sixties, or whether you’re just a fan. Of this author, you don’t wanna watch skip five episodes and then you might find another one you like. Yeah. So the idea is a kind of a combination of discovery and education. As nerdy as those themes can sound within the realm of books, they’re very exciting.
You have a billion dollar budget movie in fiction. You can go anywhere you want on the page. And so we hear about these amazing. Minds that are creating, like we have a science fiction edition, locus Magazine. In fact, tomorrow is gonna be airing Kim Stanley Robinson’s episode, and there’s a whole science fiction edition.
There’s 40, 45 authors coming up all across that spectrum, men and women from all those generations. There’s a horror edition coming up. I have a UK edition seasons five and six, which is gonna be 80 episodes I’m actually filming now. So hopefully within the next year or two we’re gonna aim to build the largest on streaming episodic archive of author interviews.
That possible. So that’s
Stephen: the goal. That’s awesome. That’s the goal. The service not only for authors, but for people reading or people that are like, I haven’t been reading much, but that looks interesting. Or, and for kids, I love that. And the fact that you’re on a TV station, tuby YouTube, it’s video, it’s big name people, smaller name across the board.
I mean the, I don’t think some people realize that the benefits to the whole author community that you’re doing it’s phenomenal.
Jake: We’re, yeah we’re, and you know what, I appreciate that, but I say it in, in Congress of this being a community of people. And I say that not because it’s the cheesy thing that you say.
It’s really true. I nobody would watch this if the authors who agreed to be on it didn’t go out and promote it to their fan bases, bottom line. So I try to vocalize that credit as much as possible at the same time. It’s really notable as well to your point, that not only are we profiling the.
Hundred million selling catalogs, Dean kus, someone like that. But we go, we really do profile, like Deisha Philia won the National Book Award. She just came out with Secret Lives of church women. We have a spectrum, Jeanine Cummings of American Dirt. There’s some really prolific. Authors that are new, but they’re really building amazing catalogs.
Attica Locke, who’s really an amazing fiction author that also wrote on Empire. I had Don Winslow on last week. We talked all about his catalog. He’s going into retirement from this to focus full-time on film. Yeah, so the Richard Russo from Empire Falls was just on, so we’re starting to John Banville.
So the, when I, sometimes, the other thing is I get these really daunting as interview assignments, and so if you’re a writer, and then they ask me, so you’re, did you retire from book writing to do this? I said, no, we’re quite in tandem. But all the script writing I do, and I do elaborate prep. I do really extensive question guides and everything is I really try to honor their catalogs without fluff questions, but in depth things that I’m not suggesting other people ask, but I have gotten feedback from in terms of Hey, I really liked that we talked for 10 minutes about a book that no one bought.
But I love as much as we talked about the big hit series that everyone keeps buying that, that felt
Stephen: pretty cool. I like that.
Jake: It’s it’s a responsibility.
Stephen: I think I, I get that. Yeah. And you’re. You’re actually one of the more prolific long-term authors that I’ve interviewed. The whole idea of this was to get newer authors that no one knows about.
Now I’m sure there’s a lot of people that don’t know your name. Jokingly. I said about No, there. Yeah. I know. I’m gonna, I’m gonna, but that’s what’s the whole idea because it didn’t really exist and I think you’re on the next level of something like that. So I know you got a hard out.
I don’t wanna hold you up. Oh no, we’re good. Another few. But yeah. But, so tell us about what are some of the latest books you’ve been writing and what’s been coming out? What’s, what have those been? Because we have talked a lot about the, but we’ve jumped around a bit and I think that’s awesome because the energy of the podcast is great.
Jake: Yeah. New books are I’m trying to think of what I, can I, you know what? I have to confess that I can’t stand. I can’t stand with the whole, like I can’t really talk about that cause it’s under con, like this and that. But it’s true. And a lot of the people I talk to when I’m like, come on, just, and they can’t, so it’s really it has that kind of sheen of ego, but there’s no, you’re under contract, but I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you too.
Stephen: Okay. Yeah. I still doing the music biographies are you doing? Yes. Okay. I just,
Jake: It, I say it almost humorously because I’m writing it with the artist. But if the artist like the manager finds out and then we get in trouble cuz they’re trying to sell it. Yeah. But the one that is going out that I, that is, we’ve done enough on the people who are fans of Teddy Riley and New Jack Swing NUJ, Jack City was a movie based on the sound.
That this guy grew up making records out of his mom’s apartment and the projects in Harlem. And whether it was New Jacks, whether it was Bobby Brown, no, my Prerogative, or Keith Sweat, or Johnny Kemp or Guy, or as he graduated to Michael Jackson and then Blackstreet, and then on and on he’s just had one of the most.
Indisputably singularly influential careers in music. And I had the privilege for the last eight and a half, nine years, we’ve been working on this book quietly together. So it’s gonna be hitting store shelves at some point this year. I read a lot of hip hop, just, but now I do it, I only do authorized books as I have for years now.
Because I think it just gives me a chance to get much more personal with the right, with the artists and corrupt. From the Death Row era is another artist that I’ve been working with. Wow. And that’s fun. We’ve got d o c in that book and Snoop and Daaz and all the Death row camp. If you’re a fan of the Chronic and you’re a fan of doggy style of those records I grew up on from the nineties and eighties, I’m a child of the eighties high school in the nineties.
You’ll enjoy that book. There is a volumes three and four national songwriter are at some point in 2024 going to get out. That’s, there’s like a, that’s probably a two book deal cause that’s like a 700 page thing and I’m not cutting from it. So it’s gotta be cut in half. So it can be, cuz these, that’s the other thing I try to do is really keep these stories as authentic with the songwriters or with the producers.
I’ve got my behind the board series, which is Nashville, but also has Two Rock. There’s a volume two and three of Beyond the Beats coming out at some point here in the next couple years. And I’ve got an audiobook deal with Blackstone that they’ve been very patiently working with me on because they’re exorbitantly expensive and irritating to record.
And I read them myself, and then I have to employ editors to edit them. So it makes it sound like I did it competently. Full disclosure. And we weave in interviews. From the actual artist that I talked to, so that’s cool. Drum the beats. Yeah. Doctors are rhythm at the hip hop producers, so it’s more time consuming.
But yeah, between all of that. And then it’s a seven day a week endeavor doing this show. So I, if I get six hours a night of sleep, I’m happy. I interview probably 10 authors a week for new episodes. We film another five for the upcoming. So it’s just, I’m blessed to be in the third decade in this career, man.
And one thing I say to anybody who asks me about it is always be writing, always be trying to think out of the box. Always be thinking about marketing, which people hate to do. They think, oh, I’m gonna hide away and write my book, and then when I get done, it’ll all work out if you get done. And you and I, even with the ghost writing, I do, we try to do proposals while we’re doing it and have an idea of where we’re gonna be putting it when it’s done.
Because the whole point in writing a book is not. It’s first to do it for yourself, but then theoretically it’s to do it for readers. Think about the whole point of why we’re talking here. It’s because all of these authors made these indelible impressions on their readers. And then those readers when turn hear about how they created those books.
If you were just to say I don’t really talk about how, and some people do, some people are very, or they’re like Stephen King and they’ve just done so many interviews that lowly me or whoever is not gonna, but I really, we really try to honor the catalogs and get the full story and do it in a way that you can sit at home on a Friday night and watch it if you’re really book nerdy or or while you’re on the gym.
You at the gym, you can listen to it on your phone. You can, we don’t we don’t do. Like a podcast version because it’s a, you can stream it and listen, right? And we don’t wanna, and the other thing is I really tried to be respectful of is there’s so many great people like yourself doing book podcasts.
There’s fr friends of fiction which Patty Callahan, Henry hosts and some others and her partners. There’s a lot of really great. New content for authors looking for tools on how to do this in the space. And yeah, that’s something we just really tried across the genre. Every genre, every generation we try to profile, because that could be the next whomever or someone watching that could be like, you know what, like Eel James was.
That was, there was a lot of fan fiction that came out of that era that launched new authors. Yeah. There was a lot. Yeah. So hopefully roundly watching the show, you’re getting a sense of these people’s careers, their catalogs, their advice and how to move forward in your own writing
Stephen: career.
And you said something about the marketing. I think the way the mindset authors miss, for example, the Heart book, if you were, he, if you didn’t have other people promoting it, but if you were hesitant to market it to get that the word out there, then all the Har fans would miss that book. And they want it they’re like longing and dying for it cuz they love heart.
The same with just about any book that’s the, mar you’re not. Trying to get people to buy your book. You’re giving them an opportunity for some entertainment they want rather than entertainment they don’t really want, but it’s
Jake: there. And on top of that, yeah, we tr like Hart Souls at the, that book for years was sold at their shows.
Joe Satriani sells that book on his, G three tours all over the world. Bands go out these days and tour to make a living. It’s a bottom line. So if you’re writing with a band that you can then negotiate to get the book on their merch table as an example of thinking out of the box. That’s what I’m talking about.
This show was a completely out of the box concept. I have a wonderful agent, Frank Wyman at Folio Lit that helped me guide me on it. And I’ve been doing it 25 years, said I’ve been 35 instead of four, 34 instead of four. 44. I don’t know that I would’ve had the experience in maturity and had made the mistakes.
I’ve made, as many as I’ve had successes. I’ll tell you right before we go 2014, I had reached a peak. So starting from 2001, I was 24. I got my first book deal here. There’s, I was 37, 38. I know I had peaked, I had more press than I could have asked for this book In you for sat.
I could not sell a book to save my life for 2015. No matter who I called, no matter with my agent. So it you, every author that’s successful is also gonna prepare to go through dips of not being successful. And you have to reinvent yourself every few years. And so this show is, thank goodness me giving an opportunity to reinvent myself a little bit and learn so much.
Imagine getting to we both get to learn so much from the people that we listen to, and that’s the whole point is we can all learn more. We can all do better even if we’re successful. There’s always people competing for that next reader. It’s dollar and people think, oh, don’t judge a book by its cover.
They all do. So like the bottom line is the more. Depth we can give anyone beyond that cover. We’re trying to, because we’re in such a quick, phase now with the way people take in their reading, even their audiobook or their, my wife is a voracious reader, but she’s also a voracious audiobook listener.
Anyway I, we just have tried to and been lucky to fit into this new 2020s format and we just hope people keep watching and appreciate anyone who does. You can go to the YouTube channel about the author’s tv, Twitter. To b you just search about and it’ll pull up about the author’s tv.
And we thank you so much for Yeah. Helping promote it
Stephen: and I’ll put links in the show and it’s great talking to you. I appreciate e everything you’ve said. There’s been tons in here for authors. Yeah, man. But I hope musicians who liked bands will check out the books. Me too.
Jake: I appreciate it.
Thank you so much. All right. Thanks Jake. Take care, buddy. Bye.