This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer. You can find all my work
at MJMunoz.com. This is Story Over Everything, episode 8, and it's a rainin'. It's a rainin'
in Southern California, therefore nobody knows how to drive, nobody knows how to react. I
may be one of those nobodies, and that's going to be okay, because we're going to make it
through this. We're going to make it through this. So, what I want to talk about today
in this session, episode, whatever, entry, entry, I like entry, entry's a good word to
put it, of Story Over Everything, episode 9, is how will you succeed? Because last time
I talked about the fact that I was going back to formula, and I don't know if any of you
need to go back to formula and figure out how you're going to make all this work. All
this is whatever you want to do, whatever is your goal in life. If you're listening
to this, it's probably because you're a writer, so it's your book, or your series, or your
movies, or whatever it is. But for me, it's book series, multiple series of books, that's
what I'm going for, and to be a success with that. But how will I succeed? And I guess
what I mean by that is what is my metric of success? That's one thing to talk about right
now, and also the strategy. So what's my metric for success? How do I define success for myself?
And also, how will I achieve that success? And I have to say, my metric for success ultimately
is that I will be able to make 100% of my living off of being a writer, a published
author, a whatever you want to call it. And yeah, I guess I can go ahead and go into what
my plan is for making money off of that, and how I plan to market, because marketing is
super important to this field of work. So from my time listening to things like the
Creative Pen podcast, as well as the Sell More Book Show, I've heard a lot about this
20 Books Vegas organization. And, or not Vegas, sometimes they're in Vegas, sometimes they're
not, but 20 books, 20 books to 50k, which means that if you have 20 books, that should,
over time, you should be able to passively get income of $50,000. Well, I say passive,
but maybe it's not so passive. Maybe you still have to market your books, because it is important
that you have to market your books, whether you're self-published or not. At least that's
what I'm choosing to believe, because I don't want to go through the traditional publishing
houses and try to get myself published for multiple reasons. And basically, I'm hearing
a lot of stuff from these two sources, I'll just put it that way. And I think, after all
said and done, what I would like to do is write a lot of books and keep writing them.
The good thing is I have a lot of ideas. I have two completed manuscripts for children's
books, and then besides that, I have five more manuscripts that are somewhere in between
the draft form and the final form right now of more children's books. So that's seven
children's books total. One of the previous... One book is just a one-off for sure, but one
of the other books that I first mentioned that it's already published, or sorry, is
already finished, the manuscript, I could turn that into a series, and I think I could
have a lot of fun with it and do a lot of good stuff with it. But I'm not going to do
that for now. And then also, I don't remember if I talked about this last episode or not,
but in developing my five manuscripts for the Grow Bug series, I actually figured out
a way to take those five books and smush them all together. It's about 7,000 word count
right now, and I could make that either a chapter book or a middle grade novel, possibly,
one of the two, and I actually plan on doing that. And that's one... You know, I'm basically
going to repurpose the content from those books, which you might say, well, how can
you turn a children's picture book into a 7,000 word or 10,000, 12,000 word thing for
older kids? That won't work. Well, you've never read one of my books. In fact, I believe
I do have the Grow Bug Book 1 manuscript up on MJMunions.com, so if you wanted to, you
can go check that out. And if I do have it there, I will go ahead and take a minute or
two and add a link to it to my show notes. And if not, then I'll consider, by the time
the next story of everything rolls around, having at least the manuscript for the first
one up, an earlier draft perhaps, and then you can check it out and see what you think
about it. But I don't talk down to my children. I'm very much... I treat them like young humans.
They're not children. I mean, they are children, but they're humans. They're people. And I
try to respect their intelligence and speak to them with the same kind of respect and,
you know, well, just general respect that I would want to be spoken to with and treated
with. So I don't treat them like idiots. I don't talk down to them. And I also don't
talk down to my readers. Also, we have read a lot of classics together. Some of the Roald
Dahl books, I think James and the Giant Peach specifically, and I can't remember if it's
Charlie or Willy Wonka. I think it's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is the book
title. And the movie's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? That sounds right, but I don't know.
Anyway, perhaps it's the other way around, but it doesn't matter at this point. Anyway,
we've read those to them and I read the first few Oz books to my kids and then I went ahead
and I listened to them all myself. But I don't think Baum, L. Frank Baum, who's the author
of the 14 original Wizard of Oz books, speaks down to children as he's writing to them.
It's old timey, so he addresses things in funny ways. Like he says, oh, our friends,
you know, Dorothy and her companions, you know, how will they get out of this danger?
I don't know. Let's keep reading and find out. That's not a direct quote. It's very
much of a very sloppy paraphrase, but he does stuff like that, which I think is cute and
charming and quaint, but it's not talking down to the kids. Because like in the first
book, Dorothy gets enslaved by the witch and it looks like her friends or the lion gets
enslaved too. And like she's forced to work for her. And like there's something funny
that the witch wants to go to the Dorothy at night when she has her silver slippers
off, but the witch is afraid of the dark, much like a child would be. But like it's
not like, oh, the witch is afraid of the dark, just like a little child like you would be.
It's just stated matter of factly. And a kid would either pick up on that and laugh or
they would notice it and be like, ooh, I'm afraid of the dark too. That witch is afraid
of the dark. It's a legitimate thing to be afraid of, which I don't think is negative.
For one thing, you're not going to have any sympathy for the witch because pretty shortly
after you find out about her being afraid of the dark, she is absolutely awful to Dorothy.
And I mean, she really has been the whole time around that, but it's, it's really strong.
Like when she dies, you're pretty happy in the book or in the book, just like in the
movie. But I don't even think a scarecrow's in danger. Oh yeah, Dorothy's just fed up
with her because she's being such an awful person and she just throws a bucket of water
on her. There's no fire or anything. And then the witch is like, no, didn't you know? Dorothy's
like, no, I didn't know, lady, sorry. But anyway, getting back on track, like I have, I don't
know how I got to that, but my basic point is I have a lot, I have, I honestly have ideas
for hundreds of books. How can you possibly have ideas for hundreds of books? You might
ask. Well, I'm a fan of pulp novels or sorry, of pulp type stories. And I'm getting into
pulp novels. I have read Greg Taylor's four or five pulp novels. Yeah. I've read slash
listened to like six total, I think four red Panda and two black Jack justice. And then
also, I think Finn's Dolem is technically like a, it's like, I don't know, not steampunk.
That's another one. The one in the future. It's like that blade movie, Blade Runner.
That's called Blade Runner, which is originally a Philip K Dick novel or short story. I can't
remember which, but anyway, it's that kind of thing. Cyberpunk is that what they call
it? Cyberpunk. Yeah, maybe cyberpunk anyway, but it's still basically a noir story. And
I listened to that whole thing. So, you know, that's pulpy and I like pulps. I've also,
you know, listened to all of the red Panda, which is they're like 25 or so minute episodes
and they're all done in the tradition of the shadow and Doc Savage and all the old radio
cereals. So like, I really like that stuff. And you know, they didn't run out of ideas
for those. And of course I'm not saying I'm going to write 120 books on a single character
like Greg Taylor could have done. But if you take 120, oh boy, I'm going to do math real
quick. This is going to get scary. If you take 120 episodes and just call them all 30
minutes, you know, round up a little bit or, you know, heck, call them 20 minutes and round
down divided by 30. I think that's a, you know, four novels you would have gotten out
of that. Is that right? I don't know. Maybe, I don't know. Sorry. If they were all a half
hour episodes and you were two of them, that would be one. So every 10 would give you five
hours, which a pulp novel, I believe most of them end up being, you know, if they're
like 50,000 words, it's about five hours worth of audio, of audiobook. Yeah. Then you could
have gotten 40 Red Panda audiobooks out of that, out of that series. If you want to round
it down, you could have gotten 30. I'm not saying I want to do that necessarily, although
it doesn't sound awful, but I honestly, I thought about it and I thought about it and
I thought about it and I thought, I bet I could do 12, a series of 12 novels for this
superhero character. However, this superhero character doesn't just exist in a world all
of their own. They have other superhero characters around them too, as well as villains and neutral
parties and different things like that. And basically I ended up exploding this idea out
so that for just one generation, I think I have seven or eight main characters and I've
broadly mapped out a 12 book series for three or four of them. And I really like it. The
process of doing it was a lot of fun. It gave me a thrill because I was deepening this universe
and making them interconnected or this world, just this one world of a handful of heroes,
less than a dozen, right? Less than 10. And interlacing their stories with each other,
making them so that they can all stand alone, but also planning for a book, either a one
off book or a book at the end of someone's series where they all come together, kind
of like how you had all the individual MCU movies and then they culminated in the Avengers.
I kind of think I want to do something like that. And the fact that there are, I think,
over 300 novels written by mostly Walter B. Gibson of just the shadow alone, that one
character, I feel like I could kind of do something similar, but spread it out and give
it some more variety by having different characters who I can explore different aspects of them
and I can have them all kind of comparing and contrasting with each other. And that's
one idea. Basically, I think if I can publish way more than 50 books, or way more than 20
books, I can reach way more than $50,000 a year. And if I have this great backlist that
I can keep selling off of, and if I keep writing characters in the same universe, even in the
same era, or have multiple eras, which is another idea I have, not only do I want to
do this first generation of superheroes, but I say to myself, why not have multiple generations
of these superhero characters, all the way starting back from like the 20s, so you get
that real noir pulp vibe, and then going into the future and seeing what else I can
do with that. And I mean, I think other than having to hire standard things that an author
would have to do, like an artist for the cover, or an editor, or whatever, if I can build
a system for myself to write many of these books over the years, then that's going to
be what I'm going to do. And I'm not saying that I need to have 12 books out a year. That's
not what I would want. As of right now, that's not what I would want. I would want to start
a little more slowly than that, but at least start planning out an entire era of about
approximately 12 books per character, and have my first era have, I don't know, like
I said, seven or eight characters. That's a lot of books. That could take me a really
long time to write. But then again, there are some of those authors who their strategy
is to publish a book a month, or a book every three months, and put out four books a year,
and they're able to do that very quickly. And I believe part of that is a strategy to
manipulate, I don't know, the Amazon market, or just the way the ads work. You put your
first book perma-free, and then you have all these other ones that you upsell. You sell
them. You put at the end of book one a link to your mailing list, or to your website,
and also in addition to that, an excerpt from the first chapter of your second book, or
maybe even, hey, this book is perma-free. Thank you very much for reading it. If you
enjoyed it so much, check out my next book, and if you sign up for my mailing list, you
get the second book for free as well. That gets the person two books deep into the series,
put on your mailing list, and then from there, you can basically, you have a relationship
with this person where you can market more of the books that they like to them, and if
they don't like it, they'll get off your mailing list, and if they do, they'll have to buy
more books, but that's kind of the ordinary set up anyway. But as a bonus, you are, and
this would be me, you're giving them these two free books with the opportunity to give
them more books that they like in exchange for them giving you value for your time in
the form of money of buying your subsequent books, and you do that with one series, and
then you move on to the next series, and so on and so forth, and if all the series interlaced
with each other, like I want them to, like I love that in the first, within the first
four issues, maybe it was even the first official, there was Amazing Fantasy 15, then there was
Amazing Spider-Man 1. I think in issue one of Amazing Spider-Man, which is his second
appearance, Peter Parker, Spider-Man, rolls up on the Fantastic Four, infiltrates their
base and tries to get a job with them, and he leaves only because they tell him it's
not a paid gig. That's so cool. The Fantastic Four had been going already before Amazing
Fantasy 15. I think they were at like issue four when Amazing Spider-Man 1 came out, and
they had the interaction. A couple issues later, Spider-Man's tussling with Doc Doom,
or Doctor Doom, and it's just really cool how it's all interconnected, and if you like
Spider-Man, and then you read this Doctor Doom issue, and you know Doctor Doom is part
of the Fantastic Four, then you might run out and get that Fantastic Four issue, so
you can read what happened with Doctor Doom over there, and it's all exciting, it all
like builds upon itself. I kind of want to build that. Like that's my plan. That's my
strategy. Somehow, in the course of writing all these books, I'm going to keep marketing
them and keep bringing them up to people and sharing them with them and seeing how I can
do that. Now, my Grow Bug books, let me check how much time I'm into this episode already.
It's about time to call it quits in a minute or two. My Grow Bug books are all based on
tokusatsu, because tokusatsu is something I'm into. It's Japanese superhero stuff, but
more specifically live action for the most part. That's your Godzilla, your Ultraman,
your Comrade, or your Super Sentai, also known as Power Rangers. Or if you remember like
Beetle Borgs or VR Troopers, those were all tokusatsu properties that were brought over
here and adapted. And I like that stuff, and I don't, you know, I like that stuff, and
that stuff is continuing to be adapted. So, I don't know if I've got my books out there,
and I happen to be talking about one of these shows because I'm watching it for my own pleasure,
and then I put out a podcast sharing my thoughts or analysis on it on several levels. And then
I say at the end of it, hey, if you like this, check out my books, my children's books that
are about tokusatsu. And if you don't want the children's book, I also have a short book,
a novella you could say, or a chapter book, whatever you want to call it. Maybe I'll market
it as a novella, maybe I'll market it as a tokusatsu novella to my podcast listeners
or whatever, to adult fans. Or in the Grow Bug books, I can also say, hey, I've written
this chapter book that if your kids like these Grow Bug books, if they like book one, you
know, check out this bigger book that has all the Grow Bug stories together. But, you
know, there's bonus because it's not just the kids perspective, it's the Grow Bugs perspective
as well. And there's a bonus of the Grow Bugs are fighting off strange new threats that
you did not encounter in the other five children's picture books. And you get to see more exciting
adventure with these Grow Bugs. And it can be pretty cool. Like that's basically my idea.
And that's what I want to do. And I'm hoping that doing that strategy effectively over
time and making sure I focus on continuing to write my books. I'm recording this while
I'm sitting in traffic, by the way. So I could be listening to something or I could be just
listening to music. I mean, like a podcast learning something, but instead I'm investing
in this, which is also part of my marketing strategy because I want to talk to you and
tell you about what I'm doing to make myself a successful author, let you in on the journey
with me. And if you enjoy being along for the ride and my personality, then hopefully
you'll enjoy the books as well. And that'll be something that over time you'll get more
drawn to. And you'll say, you know, I'm going to check out this guy's books because he's
given me some useful information. I told you about the, I told you about my strategy. I
told you about the 20 books thing. I told you about Creative Pen podcast as well as
Sell More Books podcast, which I think those are both fabulous sources, Joan of Pen and
then Brian Cohen and Claire Taylor, H. Claire Taylor do really great work over on those
podcasts and you know, I'm sharing and I'm putting this all out for free and you know,
maybe it'll eventually, this is like the freemium model. Will it get you into the things I'm
into or interested in checking out my products and my work as they come available and I'll
make sure to tell you about them here. I just, this makes sense to me. I'm elevating what
could be wasted time and turning it into the time I have for marketing my books, even though
my books aren't finished yet. I'm in the process though and I'm going to work on them more
and it's like each week I slowly add more and I don't know if I want to do this as an
official segment anymore because I had it more, I had it as something that was more
not thought out, but something that was more meticulously planned out and I don't want
to do that anymore because it felt like it was eating up too much time. The formatting
of how I would do a story over everything, the first six or seven episodes I think, but
I'm doing it off cuff. I'm doing it real loose now and I prefer this. It's only been two
episodes but I prefer it because it's a lot more fun, a lot more easy to do, a lot more
stream of consciousness which is good for me I think as a creative. But anyway, I totally
lost my frame of, I totally lost it's thread there. So you know what, I'm just going to
go ahead and call it because I'm the boss here and I can do that. But yeah, check out
MJMunus.com, look for my books, MJMunus.com, slash books or MJMunus.com. When the books
are out there should be something big at the top telling you about the books and check
them out. And yeah, I also, I stole this from Joanna Penn. I want to sell my books direct
and sell them to you for cheaper than you can get them on Amazon. Or maybe it's less,
I've heard different strategies. People say don't go cheap, don't discount stuff, do a
value added instead. So when you buy one book, from my website you get an opportunity to
buy a second book at a discount or is that selling cheap? I don't know. I don't know
how all that works, I've got to figure that out. But I'm going to do that, I'm going to
work on it all. But I'm not going to bore you with me stammering and struggling and
trying to figure out how to fill up the space with something clever. So anyway, yeah, that's
it. I'm going to go ahead and get going and oh boy, no no, we're good. I'm going to go
ahead and get going and I'm going to wish you peace and blessings folks. No, just the
one of you that's listening, I'm wishing you peace and blessings. Nobody else, nobody else.
Anyway, but I also, if you're here because you're a writer, then as they say in the business,
happy writing, go write, don't forget to do it, don't forget to drink your Ovaltine. You
need to make sure that you're putting in the work every day that you can, even if it's
five minutes a day, ten minutes a day, write, maybe reread. I'm telling my daughter, my
eldest, don't edit, don't go back over, just keep writing, keep developing your story.
If you find you need scenes, add it to your outline. Hey, I need a scene here or any chapter
here where I add this and then just go forward and write, just write, write, write, write,
write until you're done and then go back over it because that's the stage I'm at with the
Grow Bug books. I've written all five, the manuscripts are done, all draft or book one
and two are basically done 100%. I'm very happy with them. Books three, four and five
need a lot of work. They need to have drafts two and maybe three put through them, but
I'm going to try to do that or no, not I'm going to try. I will be doing that over the
course of next week. So in between this episode of story of everything and the next one, I
will have made more progress on the Grow Bug books and I'll fill you in on what that is
next time because maybe, I don't know, every other episode or every three or four episodes
I'll say, what am I doing? What's my progress on the books? And I'll share that with you
and it might be a shorter episode or maybe not depending on what I have to say at the
time. Like I said, this is all stream of consciousness going off. So yeah, go out there and I'll
cover and write. If you enjoyed me talking about the writing process, then hopefully
you'll enjoy reading or listening to my writing instead. So go over to MJMunoz.com or MJMunoz.com
slash books and check out what I have there. My plan is to keep that updated all the time
with the latest and greatest of my writing, whether that be books, audio books, you should
be able to buy direct from me there. And yes, so please go ahead over there to MJMunoz or
MJMunoz.com slash books and check out all the good stuff I have to offer there.