This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer. You can find all my work at MJMunoz.com
including the plethora of podcasts I'm about to publish.
This episode of Story Over Everything is episode 15.
It's going to be published April 21st, 2023.
And in it I am asking how do you plan to publish, or rather market your books?
And I'm going to let you know right away.
I plan to market my books via podcasting and by reviewing and by staying in touch with certain pop culture media
that is current and relevant. And some of it will be current and relevant, and some of it will be not so current and relevant.
And that's basically the plan. But I will elucidate a little bit as I can.
As I have the ability to say something.
So that's my plan. And I guess before I continue, I would like to hear what your plans are for marketing your books and your writing and yourself as an author.
And I'd be curious to hear what other people's tactics are.
Mine is basically this. I don't feel like I... Well, as an unpublished author, as somebody who doesn't have a degree or anything like that, I don't have a body of work or an accreditation to point to.
Did you see that bird? Yeah, I saw it. It was very cool.
So I'm going to build a body of work for myself to point to.
And I plan on writing books primarily, but also doing podcasts where I review things, discuss things.
Again, these things will be pop culture relevant and therefore tangentially relevant to what I'm into.
So, for example, I am... Well, actually, I'm a little bit of a failed podcaster because I have hours and hours and hours of podcasts banked up already.
That I was trying to be cheap. I was trying to be cheap or economical, frugal, however you want to say it.
And I basically ended up spending a lot of time and energy building up a backlist, building up a backlog of things that some people have listened to.
But I've gotten very little attention in the dozens. And I don't need dozens to make a career as an author. I need hundreds or thousands.
So, basically all the stuff that I've watched or... Yeah, I guess basically watched.
Read to some extent too, but more watched. I haven't done so many analysis.
I haven't done so much analysis on anything I've read. Except maybe some comic books. But regardless.
Or maybe I could use those too. Anyway, I can basically repurpose a bunch of my old content that I never really used on a large scale.
Because I didn't put budget or... Well anyway, if I get on iTunes, if I get on all these different app stores, if I get a fully official podcast service, which I do have now.
I'm paying X amount of dollars a month for it. And I can have as many podcast feeds as I want.
Well I figure I can use that to establish podcast feeds and basically I'll just pull all my old material and I'll release it at whatever pace I determine will work best for me.
And I think I'm actually going to recut them. Because some of them I wasted a lot of time on. So I will work on them.
I'll re-listen to them and I'll hear what I can cut out and I will chop the intro and outro and I'll put a new intro and outro.
And I think I'll just do that. I think that's clever and I'll just pull it down from wherever I had it placed before.
Either pull it down or repurpose, update it. That technicality I'll have to think about some more later.
But that's not for now. Because I just need the broad plan and once I figure out what I'm going to do I can figure out the details of executing it.
But I'd like to make myself a subject matter expert on certain things that are germane to what I'm talking about.
And maybe I'll kind of pace myself and I'll eventually do that plan of re-releasing everything.
So that I can focus and really concentrate on building up a market and building up a group of people.
Like building up an email list and such. Because I think the email list is the best thing to do for an office.
That's what I keep hearing. And I was even listening to... Oh yeah, Narwhal.
I was hemming and hawing a bit about how much I will share about my plan to, you know, recut and reuse this information.
But I'm actually considering the fact that Story Over Everything is a, you know, a chronicle of how I'm doing all this.
So yeah, I'll tell you the nitty gritty of the marketing and the thinking out loud that I'm going to do regarding how exactly I'm going to market all this stuff.
So let me give you a couple examples. So right now I have... You know, I don't know how many Kamen Rider reviews I have.
So Kamen Rider is a Japanese television show and movie franchise actually.
In May 31st of 2023, Fathom Events is going to be having a special screening of Shin Kamen Rider, which was done by Hideaki Anno of Evangelion fame.
If you know anime at all, Evangelion, you would know he was part of Studio Gainax, which did big things like FLCL and Karakano, which is an adaptation of like a romance, which is fabulous actually.
But anyway, yeah, so Anno is like a really big deal. He's maybe an entour. He did Shin Ultraman, which came out I think last year, 2022.
And he did Shin Godzilla, which came out in like 2018, 2019, something like that.
And that's a big deal because Godzilla and Ultraman are like kings of tokusatsu. Tokusatsu is a genre I'm into.
Kamen Rider is also big in tokusatsu. And I feel like there was one other... They were doing this initiative.
It's the Shin Japan Heroes universe, and it's Godzilla, Ultraman, Kamen Rider, and I feel like there's one more.
But Godzilla is, you know, the big monsters. Ultraman is a giant who fights monsters.
Kamen Rider is a little guy who fights monsters, but still he fights monsters nonetheless.
And that's about all I can say in a short fashion. It's Japanese special effects stuff, live action for the most part.
The focus of the Ultraman a little bit is the giantness, and the focus of Kamen Rider is that he transforms into this other...
He transforms into a superhero, a super-powered man basically, and he was gonna be brainwashed to do evil.
And he was saved from that, and then he becomes a hero protecting life above all else, even above justice and above...
I can't remember what else, but it's a very interesting thing.
But he's basically a karate bug man, themed after a grasshopper, and Anno's doing this movie.
And again, he's doing Shin Godzilla, Ultraman, and Kamen Rider, and who knows if he'll do...
I don't think there's any rumors or talk of him doing a Shin Super Sentai, which would be...
Super Sentai became Power Rangers, and that was all... Power Rangers, you know, Super Sentai rather,
and Kamen Rider were both created by the same man, Isshinomori, who created...
He's a manga creator who went on to create a character called...
Plotrine, Beautiful Mask Plotrine, who I believe inspired Sailor Moon, which is a huge anime phenomenon
that basically made the career of Naoko Takahuchi. I don't know what else she did,
but I think Sailor Moon's all she had to have done, you know.
That was her achievement, or... It was her achievement, and I think a lot of that was based off of Plotrine,
which again, was developed by Isshinomori, who also did things like Cyborg,
so again, if you're into anime or manga at all, you'll know some of these things that I'm mentioning.
Kiter, which is huge, in its own way. But anyway, that's just some of what he did.
He did other stuff, or more serious, more... Like, he literally did an adult thing,
which I don't plan on reading, because I don't really need that.
But anyway, he did that, and he did something called Gilgamesh, which I don't think has anything
to do with the actual, you know, epic of Gilgamesh, but it is something I plan on reading.
But anyway, because my interests are varied, I'm into... Well, I'm into, and I want to make,
comic books and tokusatsu stories and other things. I figure, basically, what I'm going to do is take
all these things that I've been working on over the years that I haven't taken and really turned
into something, or I haven't exposed it to a very big audience, and I will repackage them
slowly as time goes on to help me basically spin up this stuff into marketing material for the
things that I'm working on. For example, the Grow Bug series of books that I have. It's
Sheldon's Picture Book series that I have that I've talked about here on Story Over Everything
previously. It focuses on... Well, basically, it's all homage to tokusatsu characters. So,
I mentioned Godzilla, Ultraman, Kamen Rider, Super Sentai. Each one of the Grow Bug books,
that's the first four, they're inspired by those franchises and things that appear in those
franchises. And the fifth Grow Bug book is actually inspired by Digimon, which is something I'm
currently covering on MJWindows.com by making an audiobook or reading, narrating, chapters of this
Digimon book that is going to be coming out all this year long of 2023, or at least it started
in April of 2023, and I believe it will continue until April of 2024. I don't have proof of that,
but they did say it would be a year, but a year is relative. The Persona games are supposed to take
place over a year, and they take place over like nine months. So, it could be something kind of
similar. Hey, we started in the spring, we finished it in the winter, or you know, late fall, and
that's good enough for us. That's a year. We're going to call it a year. So, I don't know about
that, but I do know that being that one of the Grow Bug books is based on Digimon, and there's
this Kamen Rider movie coming out, and I want to cover Kamen Rider in a weekly fashion as well.
And, you know, there's this dub of Ultraman that's coming out right now. There's the dub of the
Ultraman movie, which will come out, I hope, 2023, but they're also dubbing one of their television
shows, which I watched the whole thing of it already. I already did reviews on it, and I could
just repackage them and just not mention it's the dub, or I could do a fresh new dub review and just
have two series reviewing the same show, one that I read the subtitles on, one that I listen to the
dub on. I don't know how I feel about that necessarily, but it actually kind of doesn't
sound like a bad idea, but I can basically use all these tokusatsu things that I like, that I'm into,
to help me market my tokusatsu-inspired children's books, which I am in the process of finishing the...
well, I'm in the process of finishing. I feel like I'm gonna have to do some rewrites, because
what I was gonna do, which I've mentioned before again on Story Over Everything, is
rewrite or reuse the Grow Bug books, the five Grow Bug books, and just basically paste them into
the body of a prose novel, and because I wrote them very much like prose, some less so than other,
but basically they're prose with pictures, and when you have the pictures, it'll elevate what you're
seeing or what you're reading, and it all works together. That's how I decided to write them.
I decided not to rely heavily on the imagery and have the imagery there to be dazzling
while you read my words. All the books done by Ruth Sanderson, who does these wonderful oil paintings,
they're absolutely gorgeous, and does children's... or retellings of children's books,
or children's stories like Cinderella, and I can't think of anything else at the moment, but
the Cinderella is gorgeous. It's absolutely a beautiful book, and there's tons of text in those.
The page count or the word count on those must be much higher than modern-day picture books,
and even though these are going to be picture books, I still want them to be, you know, verbose enough.
Some of them are here. One is around 940, and I've got one that clocks in to like 2500,
and I'm okay with that because I think it works for the story, and I'm an indie author,
indie publisher, so I feel comfortable, you know, pushing myself, pushing the limits,
and going ahead and doing that. But anyway, regardless, my plan was to upcycle those five
books and just copy and paste them into a prose novel that goes into the lore and deals with the
world of the grow bugs, and I tried doing that. I'm basically to the part now where I could just
copy and paste into the five books and then continue the rest of my story, but in developing
the story of these grow bugs, which are these, you know, magical guardian angel things that protect
children from, you know, terrible things in the night, the story has transformed itself,
and it's come alive, and it's becoming something bigger than I thought it was going to be, and
I like that. It gives me pause a little bit because I don't know how far into 2023 I'll be done with
writing that book, but I don't plan on spending... I hope I make it... I hope I'm finished by July.
It's April right now, but it'd be lovely to be finished within a month or two. I guess that's...
Yeah, that's about right. I guess June is the sixth month. It'd be great to be done within two
months. 100% done, because as I'm developing the prose novel and the lore of the grow bugs that
it contains, it's kind of expanding the grow bug... the five grow bug books potentially, and I may
even have to rewrite the five grow bug books to tell them from the perspective of the grow bugs,
and I'm gonna have to try to restrain myself to go ahead and do that rewrite and do it simply and
make it like... I don't know, slick and concise, as opposed to blowing it up into something really
big, which one of them... I'm so tempted to blow it up into something big because I wrote this whole
backstory and synopsis for how this adventure was facilitated happening with this one kid,
and it like ties into my holy heroes books that I want to do too, and honestly there's even a little
bit of tying into the holy heroes books in this larger prose novel that I'm writing because
I thought, oh I can... I want to have a character like this and like this so that they're a pair of
perspective characters, and they ended up feeling a little bit like, or reminding me of, these other
characters who I have in the larger holy heroes book series, and it made me think, oh I should
include these characters, or I should make it potential so that these characters can go on to
you know be involved in these later stories, and I may... I very well may do that, and if I do that
will be interesting, but anyway I'm trying not to let myself get distracted, and I'm trying to focus
on just writing this stuff, but my overall point is and why I'm talking about this here in the
marketing thing is, I'm talking about these tokusatsu things, and there are plenty of people
who are close to me demographic, close enough to me demographically, who enjoy this stuff,
and who I think as adults would enjoy reading these books, as you know I like them as an adult,
my wife isn't into tokusatsu at all, but she thinks they're good stories, so I'm hoping to you know
work on that group of people, that cohort, and make them a market, and some of these people,
I don't know how many, but saw them who enjoy these things, are having kids and sharing these
things with their kids, and I'm hoping to market these books to their kids, and I figure while I'm
talking about these these shows, I can include the information about the Girlbugs series inspired by
these tokusatsu heroes, and just make a pitch for it, and maybe build up some traction, and you know
build up traction for those, get a crowdfunding thing going to fund these books, and I'm hoping
that'll work, so I'm hoping I can also pull those people into my my list, especially if I take what
I currently have right now that is on the website, and I kind of decommission it, pull it down from
there, and then republish that stuff, re-release it, and maybe I can go and track down my other
feeds, and somehow terminate them, so that I just have everything going through this one new feed
that I'm controlling in this better way, and I can gear the releases towards doing the marketing for
that. Another thing to say is I am launching right now, I just started this Red Panda podcast, and
I'm going to cover all 120 episodes of Red Panda within within the space of two years, two years,
54 a year, no no no, a little longer than two years, 120 yeah, so if I did 54 times two, that's 108,
which that's not enough time, so over the course of two years plus, I'll cover all of Red Panda,
including the four, I think it was four, pulp novels that Greg Taylor wrote, and
I want to write pulp-era superheroes as well, so the plan is going to be basically to have a long-term
relationship with people who are into pulp heroes, who are into things like Red Panda, and to kind of,
you know, create a market, create a community, create a group of people who I'm in contact with,
who enjoy that stuff, and then be able to say, hey, you've enjoyed this so far, and now I have
this thing going, and I don't know how soon to start that, I don't know exactly, well anyway,
I don't know how soon to start that, or how exactly to spin it, because I don't yet have
a base, I don't have enough written in those superhero stories, I'm just working on, I'm
still working on developing those, and fleshing out the pulp-era, because, well anyway, I'll just
stop that. The pulp-era of my superhero series, multiple series, I have partially planned out,
about a third of it planned out, and I want to plan out the rest of it, and that would tie in
very nicely to talking about Red Panda, and I don't think, well maybe, maybe I'll start with
Red Panda, and I'll go from there and start talking about Shadow or other things, and
yeah, certain advancements might help me with that, or maybe I need to find another radio pulp-hero,
something in the vein of Red Panda, that I can, you know, focus on, and talk about, and have common
ground with people, if hey, if you like this thing that I like, then check out this, which I've
talked about the concept before, but only now that I officially have the podcast thing going, that
I'm paying for, you know, the paid podcast service, do I really have the opportunity, and did it
really give me the, I don't know, the space in my mind, or the notion, the spark, to think, oh I can
actually, you know, upcycle all of these old podcasts into marketing material for this, you
know, for these projects I have for writing. One caveat, one bit of trouble is that I'm nearing,
I don't know, I'd say I'm about 30% done with the Grow Bug Tales novel, which will
grow bug tales novel, which will, you know, encapsulate, it'll be a whole pros thing for
the Grow Bug stuff, and like about 30% through with that, but I have a fantasy series idea that
I wrote a little bit of, it's, it has to do with dragons, and I wrote one of those, I have a
manuscript for the first children's book of that, and I think it's lovely, and I had planned years
ago, because I wrote it about, I don't know, two, maybe three years ago at the most, I think, I had
a notion of how to expand it into a series, because I wanted to explore more of this dragon lore and
mythology and everything, and as I'm working on this Grow Bug Tales, I think, oh, I should do the
same thing with the dragon book, I should write the other manuscripts for the children's books,
and then spin up a pros novel, a short pros novel around that too, and then I can have both of these
things, and I can have, one book is, one series is five books long, the other book is about four
series, the other series is about four books long, and then I'll have nine children's books to my
name, plus the other two collected books that kind of upcycle those children's books, and
are pros only, so there's no pictures, and I can really use that too, and then I'll have, boom,
a big body of work, nine children's books, two chapter books, or I think chapter book is the
right term for it, chapter book or young middle grade, I think is what it would be, books, and
then, hey, I'm an established author, I have this track record, you can see the quality of my work,
these are the kinds of things I write, it's children's, but it's more than children's,
and now that I have those, and I have those out in the world, and those are all out in the world
within 2023 and 2024, God willing, then I'm going to kind of move on from those, bring them up every
now and then as things I've done, put them up on sale, or do whatever, actively, well, kind of
softly market those as I'm continuing to write my other stuff, and I can also say, hey, I'm the
author of nine children's picture books, about half, five of them are about this, four of them
are about this, and they each have a really cool short novel that goes with them, and your kiddos
will like it, you'll enjoy it, and boom, that'll be kind of a thing that I have, or I can have those
as a landing page on my website and have a podcast, and the podcast, I always say go to mgmunus.com,
you know, that's a strategy for sure, and then I can move on from those, kind of maintain some
marketing presence on those, and keep them, you know, as something advertised on the website that
the podcast sends you to, so as I'm reaching like-minded people, people who like the things
I like, and like the way I think about things and analyze things, they'll check out the website and
say, hey, I want to see what else this guy has, and they'll see those things there, and then I can move
on to the bigger series, that's, you know, two years from now in 2024, hopefully I'll have a handful of
the pulp novels done with these superheroes, and I can start marketing those on the feed that contains
Red Panda, I think that would be fabulous, or you know, Red Panda report my reviews on it, so
yeah, I think this is the strategy I want to use, and it feels a little convoluted and a little crazy,
but like, I want to be entertained by these stories anyway, they're things I'm consuming anyway,
so I may as well take that consumption of the stories and turn it into content for people and
marketing for myself, and that's it, I offer you all this entertainment and insight into these
things for free, and then I also make you know, or I make it known to you that if you like these
things that I like, that we can have some sort of exchange, some sort of partnership, and work
together, and you can buy the books, and I can sell them to you, and we can, you know, both be a little
happier when it's all said and done, so I think I'm going to go ahead and wrap up for now,
I've got a lot of thoughts spinning, but I need to stop and redirect myself, so with that, this is MJ
signing off, and I hope that you come back for more. I hope you enjoyed that, go to MJMunoz.com
to leave any questions, comments, or other feedback you might have, there you can find
all of my analysis, art, and fiction. I cover books, tokusatsu, comic books, anime, and more.
Look around, you're sure to find something else that you'll enjoy as well.
This has been a Story Over Everything production.