Welcome to the Daily Greatful, I am Michael Gross. That was a sample, gosh, I hope I don't get in trouble, of Foxes and Fossils. Let's get the podcast started. How are you?
Welcome to Thursday on The Daily Greatful, and my name is I already told you, you never mind. Anyway, that's Foxes and Fossils. I first found them like nine or ten years ago, maybe longer, you know, whenever they started doing videos and they're a family band out of Georgia, a little town north of Atlanta. And you've got dad and you've got a bunch of old his buddies, they used to have a band called The Mercaries.
His wife was a singer in the band. Well, then daughter Sammy and Sammy's friend wanted to join and they turned themselves into the Foxes and Fossils. And the way I found them is I wanted to hear sweet, Judy blue eyes. Trust me on this.
Go to YouTube and type in sweet, Judy blue eyes. And they are going to show up live in some bar in Georgia and doing that years ago, when the girls were all very young, still in school, still in like high school. And oh, my goodness gracious sakes alive. That blew me away.
I immediately became a fan and I've been following them ever since. And they have evolved and the Mercaries don't play anymore. It's just these guys and dad's gotten gray hair. But oh, they are so good.
I encourage you to listen to them because they are so here's a little bit more. They harmonize so well. Listen to this. And I'm betting that they're not as scap.
So we're not going to get a copyright. So that's Sammy, the daughter and these are the other two girls doing the harmony. And then all the older people are playing all the other instruments and they're so, so good. But that's not what I wanted to talk to you about today.
Today, we're going to talk because I got a request for it. So I'm going to do it. I'm going to the Tampa Bay Technology Center and there are people in here who listen to my podcast plus I read a newsletter for them and on Wednesdays and you know, they're so interested in self-publishing. Now, let's talk about self-publishing.
It's been around forever, forever. Vanity publishing is what they used to call it. And if you want to self-publish somewhere around here, I got a book, let me see if I have it here. Here it is, holding it in my hand.
If you wanted a book and you self-publish it, you had to have it printed. Now I'm going to go, I'm holding natural gardening and alternative to poisonous pesticides by Leo Van Meer. His daughter who has since passed away was a self-publisher. And she made this book.
It's a really cool book. She had this book forever and Leo Van Meer wasn't my neighbor, as a matter of fact, which I did not know until I met his daughter. And anyhow, she made this book and it's a paperback book and she had the cover is full color. And she had that printed, believe it or not, where did she have that, she had that printed I believe in China.
I believe either China or Japan, but I believe in China. And then she did the typesetting with her IBM Selectric typewriter and she would put in the artwork by hand for each of the chapters. And there are pictures in here of Mr. Van Meer, you know, with a wheelbarrow and all kinds of stuff.
But it looks self-publish. And what she did is she made 5,000 of these to start with. And the way she did it is she had this all printed and this is, I think this is five and a half by eight and a half. So she had printed two up on an eight and a half by 11 paper, had it cut, and then she had to sit there and collate these damn things by hand.
So she had to collate how many pages are in this thing. There's a bunch of pages in this thing. There's 209 pages in this thing. She had to collate them all by hand on big tables that she had sprawled out all over her house.
But she had to cover printed in China. She had to wait for that comeback. She had this, then she put these things all together and stuck them all together and hammered them all together. And then she did what's called perfect binding, which she had them all together and she would put a brick on top of each one and she would paint glue on the bottom of it or on the side of it to hold all of these things together.
And that was called perfect binding. And it was a special glue and she did that all by hand for 5,000 books. And then when the covers came, she glued the covers on to the book. And then she had a garage full of books because how are you going to sell them?
Right? There was no Amazon back then. So she would take them around to local bookstores and gardening centers and all of this good type of stuff to sell these books. And she was a self-publisher.
I don't know how successful this book was. She did a couple of more books herself on asthma. She was real big on asthma. I think that's what killed her.
I'm not sure. But she did a couple more books on asthma that she self-published. I have a friend that was a Dan Kennedy fan, if you know, you know. And he self-published a motivational book that I've never seen, but I've heard about it.
And I didn't know I went to his house one time. I saw them on a pile in the garage. I got a palette. Yeah, like a half a palette of one of these things of these books because in those days, you printed them and then you had to figure out a way to sell them.
And he would go out on speaking engagements and bring the books with them and sell the books, autographed copies, a rough way to do it, a really rough, rough way to do it. Very, very, very difficult. And you know, so I don't, I don't suggest that. It's nothing that I would highly suggest that you do.
But I have information. Let's listen to a little bit more of these guys. Can we do that? And I get them.
I don't know where the volume is. Oh, there it is. Bring bring up the foxes and the fossils. Listen to them.
I'm going from foxes and fossils back into self-publishing and telling stories. They got to go down now. Again, I'm going to suggest that you look them up there. That good.
But now self-publishing is a lot easier, but not as easy as it could be or should be or maybe, I don't know. It's a hell of a lot easier now than it was. And there are shortcuts that you can take that I have not taken. I have self-published some books and I'm working on two of them right now.
They're on my computer. One is 108 questions that people used to ask my, I took the top 108 questions that people would ask my gardening show from all across the country. And I listed them all and then I'm writing answers to all of them. And I'm 80% done.
I just kind of like ran out of steam and put that on the back burner. And then I did another book that I'm working on also all about Florida lawns and garden. And I'm working on that and I've worked on that quite a bit, but I've put it away because I ran out of steam on that. I need to get my steam back on both of those.
Boy, here's the thing. Here is the thing. When you're self-publish a book, like I've got this book, you have to have it, edit it. You cannot edit it yourself.
You self-edit it the first time. You go through it and you do all of that. And then you have to hire an editor or you can do a friend of mine who's a self-publisher. When she did a dating book, her first self-published book was a dating book.
And she wrote this, came out to be about 190 pages and she had a college journalism student edit it. And the way she paid the college student is she put her name on the cover, edited by this person, which was very smart because generally you pay an editor a goodly amount of money. And you look for book editors, they charge you by the word for editing. And some of them, you know, you can get it cheap, but you want a good editor.
So I have got a master degree English teacher that is going to edit both of my books. And I'm not going to pay her. I'm going to pay her by putting her name on the cover and giving her credit on the cover. It's how I'm going to do that because I don't, you know, can you make money self-publishing and the answer to that is yes, absolutely you can.
And I'm getting a phone call and I'm shutting off the ringer. There. I thought I was shutting off the ringer. Come on.
Push the button. Okay. That's good. I thought anyway, ringer is off.
So any who, you can make money. There is a guy named, let's see if I've got his book here or if that one of his, no, I think I took them in the other room, but he has written a couple of small books that he has self-published and they're on Amazon and they sell for like $9.95 and his cut out of it is something like three or four dollars by the time, you know, Amazon takes their chunk out of it. And he has sold on the one book about, I think it's called You're Going to Die and it talks about life spans and everything. It's a pretty cool book actually if you really want to know.
But if you, he's, I think I saw him on or listened to him on a podcast not long ago where he said to his surprise, he has made something like $10,000 off one of the books and more off the other book and the money keeps rolling in and he's doing nothing to publicize them. He's just out there. He's on social media. He's on podcast.
He's got a YouTube channel. He does stuff like that. And he does that. He's a young lady on the Tikki talk who wrote another self-help book.
I didn't buy it, but I saw her doing a live on Tikki talk and she's hawking the book on TikTok and she's opening up and she's reading passages out of it and she's doing all this. And by the way, if you didn't want to buy it, you can listen to her and over the course of several days, she read the whole book. If you wanted to do that, but if you read the whole book and you want, I love books. I do not bring things into my house.
I just don't. I take things out of my house, but there is an exception to that and that is books. I am an audio equipment, here I say, but books, I will bring books into the house. I buy books all the time.
I love books. I don't. I have a Kindle and well, actually I have an iPad that I have a Kindle app on and I get some books under Kindle form, but I really don't like it. If I'm reading at night, I will read a book on Kindle at night whilst I'm laying in bed because I don't have to have a light on.
I can just read it off the screen that way. But I like holding a book in my hand, turning the pages, underlining stuff and putting a card in there and all of this and that's what I like to do. And self publishers like my friend that I was talking about the wrote the dating book, her name is Tara Richter. She publishes books that are out there, you know, they're physical books.
Some of her books are big and some of her books are small. She's got some books that are like, I don't know, 65 pages that sell really well that she sold a lot of and continues to sell a lot of on self publishing and other things. So she's done very, very well with those and it's large fonts. So not a lot of words, but she sells them.
Self publishing is no longer the second best as they say who is a big player in self published. Now, if you want to publish a book, you can go to Amazon, that's just one of Amazon KDP and you can, you have to follow all the rules, but that's how I, what I do now, and you submit it to them. And then when, you know, they'll prove it and all of that and you have, there's a lot to learn about that. You know, you've got to get yourself, you know, ISBN numbers and things like that.
And they will give you an ISBN number on a book that you write, not, they will not give you one on a low content book, but a book that you write, they will give you an ISBN number. But do you want that? And I have taken theirs, but I have since found out, no, no, no, no. You want your own.
And if you're going to do a lot of this, you buy your own ISBN numbers and they're not cheap, but unless you buy like a hundred of them, then they're cheap. But you know, I've learned and I'll probably still keep using Amazon, ISBN for free, ISBN by the way, is a way that the Library of Congress categorizes your book. And if you look it up in the library, your book up in the Library of Congress, it's listed, you know, with an ISBN number. So that is good.
You can go beyond Amazon. Now, by the way, when you do Amazon, they do print on demand. So in other words, if someone buys one of my books, there's one of my books up here. Now, I took them all out of here, but if someone buys one of their all over on that other shelf over there, if somebody buys one of my books, they send in the ordered, you know, type in the ordered Amazon.
And right away, just like that, boom, boom, boom, Amazon throughout the country has all of these printing presses that will publish the book, publish the cover and zap out the individual book and out it pops out one individual book. And if I buy a book that way, a self published book that way, the ones that I get are printed in Orlando, Florida, in the center of the state, where they've got one of these presses that just crank those things out and it goes into a little cardboard thing. And they ship it out to you, the Amazon delivery guy brings it over, usually here within two days, pretty nice, pretty awesome. But there's other ways.
And by the way, you can do a Kindle book. I did a podcast with a master herbalist one time and we published, we took the podcast that we did and I'm not going to tell you a lot about it because I just don't feel like talking about it. Okay, I'll talk about it. He was selling male enhancement pills that he made, herbal, male enhancement pills that he made.
So I took the tape or, you know, the audio from that. And at those time, it was a lot more expensive. It was, I think it was, I forget, like a dollar, a word or something like that to get it to get it transcribed. Now there's ways you can get it done for free.
But back then, we paid for that. And then I wanted a cover for it. So I went on Fiverr and I had, you know, his book cover put on Fiverr and it cost me $7 to do that. All right.
And, and then we published it just on Kindle. So when we did this podcast, we did a podcast and we released it as a podcast, we made a blog the same way with the transcription, we made a blog and we did that. And then we made it a Kindle book. And when we made the Kindle book, it was, you know, on Amazon and let me see if it's still there.
I don't think the, I don't think that the book is still there. As a matter of fact, I know the book is not there, but I think you can see the cover. And because I think that is still there. I'm going into Amazon right now and I'm typing in my name and, oh, there's some planning your podcast, ask the Garden Geek Journal, nope, it's not there.
Michael Crows in, but let's see, I thought that it was still there. Let's go to my author page and nope, it's not on my, thank God they took the cover off my author page because I unpublished the book like right away because I was embarrassed by that. I don't think that's my name on it. But we put it out there and by the way, he, you know, we sold a bunch of those Kindle books and for 99 cents, the Kindle books were, I need to shut my finger off.
The Kindle books were 99 cents. And by doing that, I think I made 30 cents for each one. And we sold, I think I came out to making dozens of dollars off of that. I mean, not a lot of money at all, but double dollars, dozens of dollars, not that good, not that good at all.
But you know, it was out there. So there it was and we, you know, we just put it out there and, and, you know, but he took it. Here's what he did. He took it and he has his phone in thing that he does with a religious organization.
And they have weekly calls and worldwide, there's something like, I don't know, 70, 80,000 people on some of these calls, mostly around 20,000 people are listening to these calls where he does a Christian herbalist thing. And he sold a bunch of those pills, but he first, he tried to sell the Kindle books, and I'd taken the Kindle book down. But that's where we got, when I got all the sales, I got where I made dozens of dollars. It came from him doing that.
But he made tens and thousands of dollars selling his, you know, male enhancement pills. And then as a matter of fact, he ran out of ingredients and had to, you know, it was a mess. It was just a real mess. And I am absolutely delighted that that is now past us.
That was just, you know, that that was just, so anyway, that is one way to do it. If you don't want to use Amazon, a lot of my friends are using Ingram spark. Ingram spark is really cool. They are a self-publisher.
My friend Chris Cemento has published a book that was a little hardcover book and he used Ingram spark and it is fantastic, fantastic. And it was a very short book, it was, you know, very, very short book. So how do you sell them? Well, you sell them.
I just told you how my friend was selling our Kindle book that I took off the market. But Chris sold his book by doing a lot of public speaking and podcasts and YouTube channels and that type of thing. A bunch of those books, I mean, a bunch, a bunch of those books. I had that book up here.
I don't know where it is. I moved all my books from right here where I used to keep them all and they're over in a closet on the other side of the room that I need to clean up. And you can also use Apple books, Google Play books, Kobo, draft a digital, smash words. There's a bunch of them.
But the print on demand versus bulk printing, I say, go with the print on demand. Now, a guy that my darling daughter was dating wrote a self-published book and he used a service called Lulu, which was a print on demand thing, but it was very expensive, very, very expensive to buy the book. I bought the book because I wanted to see what this guy was like, terrible, terrible, terrible book. And I gave it to my daughter and she gave it to him.
This he was too cheap to buy his own book. So, but the next thing you really want to consider doing is if you publish a book that you like, that you really, really like, you're going to want to make it into an audio book. Now, there's two ways essentially to do this. You can sit down in front of Mr.
Microphone like I am right now. And you can read the book yourself. That's going to take a bunch of editing that you're going to screw up, but you can do that yourself. Or Amazon has people who will do it for you, but you have to split the royalties with the person who does that, you know, reading it and you have to split the royalties with them.
And I know people who make a lot of money reading other people's books. I know a lady that I met on the TikTok who is making a full time living reading other people's books. She has a little studio. She's got a fabulous microphone and she just sits out there with us and she can do accents.
And if she does fiction, she can play the characters and she's really good at it and she makes a lot of money doing people's Amazon books. So, but then after that, you know, the big secret is marketing, you got to be able to sell it. Publishing is easy part. Selling is a new game.
You have to build an audience. Now, if I'm going to go and I'm going to use TikTok to sell my book and I'm going to use YouTube to sell my books, but primarily I'm going to use TikToks and I'm going to do TikTok lives and I'm going to talk about the books on TikTok live and everybody that I know that has done this, I private message some of them and some of them have been very nice to share that the numbers that they get by doing this is kind of outrageous. They're doing really, really, really well with. So, something to think about, 25 minutes and 53 seconds into the podcast, this is a long drawn out one.
I've received two phone calls. I've played Foxes and Foxles and did I complain about my daughter in this? No, I complained about this guy that my daughter dated. His name was Greg and I used to call him Greg Cole.
My daughter loved that name. But that's what I refer to. I say, oh, it's Greg. I don't call him that to his name.
I'm going to take him out of the lunch to Uters one time and I knew somebody that worked there and I said, oh, this is my daughter, Cassie, and that's her boyfriend, Greg, he didn't like that. You know, sometimes life is hard. We'll see you all tomorrow.