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What Does Shawn Think – Part 2


[0:00:00.1] TG: Hello and welcome to the Story Grid Podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I’m your host, Tim Grahl and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Shawn Coyne. He is the creator Story Grid, the author of the book Story Grid and an editor with over 25 years’ experience.

 

In this episode Shawn is getting close to the end of going through and editing my manuscript and we have some very particular things to talk about around how we’re going to do the appendix, how we’re weaving things into the story, what the narrative drive of the story is and just figuring these things out as we get to the point where I get to do one or two more passes of the book and then it’s done.

 

It’s a good episode. It’s been helpful for me to continue to have these conversations and hopefully — I’m hoping through this, because this is the first time I’ve worked with an editor like this through a book and I hope as you’re listening that you start to get a sense for what an editor should do with you. They’re not there to fix your sentences or to make sure the chapter headings are right. They’re there to help you figure out your story and to figure out your book.

 

So I hope that this is raising the bar of what you’re expecting from your editor as you listen to this. Anyway, I’ll stop talking so we can jump into the episode and get started.

 

[EPISODE]

 

[0:01:28.3] TG: Shawn, I have to say that the last couple of weeks have been glorious because I have not been the one with homework. It’s the first time in two and a half years of doing this podcast that I get off the podcast and I’m done and you have work to do, which is kind of nice.

 

So I’ve been on my end, one, kind of catching up on projects that were lagging because I was working on the book and then I’ve also been setting some ground work for the marketing and the launch of the book. Starting to reach out for blurbs, beginning putting together a book website, we’ve got the cover done and just trying to think through some of those things before I have to dive back into the book when you get it to me. But I would like to hear just kind of where you’re at with the manuscript and if you have any questions or any thoughts about the manuscript and what we should be doing with it.

 

[0:02:23.0] SC: Okay. Yeah, I’m feeling good about the manuscript. I have about 12,000 words left. So I’m about two-thirds of the way through, and I think I talked about this a little bit last week, but I’ll just sort of circle back and take it from the 30,000 foot view to start so that people understand kind of what editors do and publishers do when they’ve got a project that they’ve acquired and it come in.

 

Okay. You got me your through line story first draft about 10 days ago, maybe a week and a half ago. So when you did that, we purposely created basically just, “I was born in a ramshackle shack in West Virginia,” and then you take it through until the present moment. The reason why I like that conception is that it’s extremely story-driven. It’s very personal. The other thing that’s really wonderful about it is that this is a big idea work of nonfiction.

 

Now, a lot of people always ask me — I’ll just sort of go off on tangents, but it’s kind of the way I think this episode will go. A lot of people ask me questions about, “I want to break the rules. Why can’t I break the rules on genre? Why is it that I have to have this particular obligatory scene? When can I break the rules?” And the answer to that question is, “When you know the rules really, really well, then you can break the rules, and you don’t really break the rules. What you do is innovate the rule,” and that sounds like some kind of rune, but it’s true.

 

So the big idea work of nonfiction is, again, a combination of three different things. It has the qualities of a work of academic research, meaning there is actual stuff behind what’s in the story to back it up. So there is empirical research, if you will, or psychological studies that back up what the person is saying in the book, because if there weren’t, then it could just be anybody saying anything without any research or backup. So you want to have an academic quality to the work.

 

The second thing is that you need to have prescriptive information in the work that will allow people to use the book as one would use a recipe to make a cake. The cakes that emerge from recipes are not all the same, but they’re close to the same. So that how to approach is another element that has to be in a big idea book. The third approach is the narrative structure of the big idea book which is story-based, meaning there are inciting incidents. There are progressive complications. There are crises, climaxes and resolutions. So all of that story structure that you we talked about ad nauseam has to be in a big idea book. The reader needs to sense these moments of inciting incident, progressive complication, crisis, climax and resolution and that will be the thing that will make them continue to read the book as if it were actually a story, meaning interesting.

 

So with those three things is our fundamental requirements in a big idea work of nonfiction, and the book I always use to explain what I mean by big idea is The Tipping Point. Now, as the editor of the book, I can say to myself, “I’m very, very secure in the fact that there is a tremendous amount of psychological empirical research that backs up all of the tools that Tim talks about in his story. You may not even be sure of that, Tim, but I am, because these tools you’ve talked about with me for two years and whenever you tell me a tool in the back of my mind it clicks down a pathway to something I read by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow or something I read 20 years ago when I was in — Or further than 20 years ago. Something I read in college.

 

So a lot of that stuff is inside your book that you don’t even really know, and also you use a lot of source material in the story like Radio Lab. Radio Lab is a radio show that uses empirical psychological data among other data to back up the stories that they tell on the show. All right, so all of that stuff, I wasn’t worried so much about.

 

The crucial element for me and for you was can we make people actually interested in this story? Is there something that will entertain people as they read it? That is the very biggest — That’s the big challenge in nonfiction because when people buy a novel they’re like ready. They know, “I’m in for a story. I’m totally ready to go.” When people buy nonfiction, they are looking for pretty much “factual information” that will move them along in their lives, and they’re not necessarily looking for really compelling storytelling.

 

So what’s a really great bonus and additional value added in nonfiction is when you bring wonderful storytelling skills to the page, then the people who are coming for what I used to call a medicine book — This is a medicine book, meaning, this is something I should read because it will make me a better person. It’s like taking a spoonful of cod liver oil every morning for your digestive system. You know you should do it, but nobody wants to. We don’t want people to look at your book and say —

 

[0:08:50.8] TG: That’s not how I want people to approach my book.”

 

[0:08:54.5] SC: Exactly. So we don’t want that. We want people to look at it and go, “Hey! I bet there’s some good information in there. I bet I can slog through it and it wouldn’t be too bad.” That’s actually not a bad thing for nonfiction, because they are attracted to the subject matter. Anybody who’s going to be interested in even considering reading your book is going to be attracted to the title, running down a dream. They’re going to say to themselves, “Hey! I have a dream. I wonder how I’m going to get it.” “Oh! There’s a book that says running down a dream. I bet there’s some information in that book that could help me.” That’s like the first allure to potential readers.

 

So if we can get them to the candy store and get them to start reading a page or two, and if that page or two is actually really compelling, we can probably convince them to buy it. Once they buy it, then we have to actually give them far more value in the book than they imagine that they would ever. So that’s a lot of promises we have to make, a lot of promises we have to not only meet, but actually make larger. I mean, we have to deliver more than the promise.

 

So for me, when you can deliver story in nonfiction, it’s great, because the reader is not expecting great story in nonfiction. So that was the very — That’s the big, big massive boulder that we had to push up the hill through all the hard work you did, and not that it was perfect, but you delivered me a big, big chest of gold bullion that had tons of inciting incidents, tons of crises, tons of climaxes, tons of resolution, tons of complication. for someone like me, I’m like, “Oh! I can just jumble all these stuff up in a really hearty stew that will read really well from beginning, to middle, to end.”

 

So that’s great. Now, what else do we need in the book? So let’s go back to it. We need the book to have the academic backup and we need that how to approach. So one of the things I wanted to talk to you this week about is when you get the manuscript back for me, which should probably be — I’m hoping by the end of this week. As you go through it, yes, of course, make all your micro corrections, write down all the things that you want to go over with me that you don’t like, that you want to change, etc., etc. But the other thing I think we need to put in this book is at the very end, what I’d like to have is a really great appendix, and the appendix will pull out all of those tools that are in the narrative. So you will have the list. You will literally have a list of the 40 things that you talk about in the book. Because what I think people are going to find is that they’re reading your book and they want to know, “Oh my God! How is Tim going to deal with the fact that he’s $20,000 in debt to the IRS? How’s he going to get out of that?” So they’re going to be sucked stock in to the story and they’re going to naturally not really write down the information of how you actually got over that problem.

 

So at the end of the book, I want you to have an appendix that goes, “Here are the tools that I discussed in my story,” and you list them, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and on and on, down to — I think you probably have — You know better. Like 40 in there? Something like that?

 

[0:12:54.1] TG: It’s like 30, I think.

 

[0:12:55.4] SC: Great!

 

[0:12:55.9] TG: But, yeah, I can’t remember.

 

[0:13:00.3] SC: Yeah. I mean, this is why when you go through the book, that’s good that you can’t remember by the way, because you weren’t worried —

 

[0:13:07.8] TG: So that’s not like something I need to see a doctor about?

 

[0:13:10.3] SC: No, because your first draft of this thing was what I’m telling you your appendix is going to be, right?

 

[0:13:20.8] TG: Okay. Yeah.

 

[0:13:21.9] SC: But it’s going to be like the cliff notes of that 40,000 words of stuff that you wrote before that wasn’t in story form. So that’s one appendix, and perhaps in the same thing what I’d like you to do is to add as much as you can references to books and scientific articles in the psychological database out there in the universe that supports the things that you are suggesting people do.

 

For example, one of your tools is to — Like that great story you tell about riding across the dam, right? When you wrote across that dam, you had read an article in the mountain biking magazine that said, “Don’t look down when you’re in a narrow passage. When you have a very small margin of error on a roadway, look towards your destination and let your confidence in your brain do the work of keeping the wheel on line, because if you start doubting, the confidence you already have, what you’ll do is micromanage things that are autonomic in your brain and you will wobble and fall off the dam.” So that’s actually been really solidified in the psychological research.

 

So I would love to have a reference underneath that tool. It’s like keep your eyes on the prize, not on the micro obstacles. That could be like the name of the tool, whatever it is that you come up with. Then you would have, “See blank-blank-blank at blank-blank-blank, or the book blank-blank-blank,” so that people can go to your appendix after they read your book and go, “Hey! That was a pretty good story, but not going to work for me. That’s just good for Tim,” and then they go to the appendix and they see all the tools and then they see all the backup, “Oh my gosh! I guess this is a universal truth that you should keep your eyes straight ahead and focused on the big goal in front of you instead of the micro problems on the way to the goal. You have to trust yourself that you have the confidence to beat down all of those tiny little hurdles on your way to the big goal. Those little buggy things are going to be able to fix, so don’t sweat them. When they come up,  you knock them down and then you keep moving.”

 

So that’s what I think we can do to really strengthen the two other elements of the big idea book without detracting from your story. So the appendix would have all the tools and then a reference to the scientific literature underneath one of the tools or perhaps a reference to another book that makes a similar point. I can help you with that as long as you — If you literally go to Google and put things like focus on the long-term, Google’s so smart, start pulling up psychological papers that you can look through and make sure that they are in keeping with the message that you’re putting forward. Does that make sense?

 

[0:16:50.2] TG: Yeah. I feel pretty good about being able to find this stuff. I mean, some of it already have — Because all of these stuff, when I started this journey I was an idiot and knew nothing, and then I learned things. So I didn’t learn things by meditating in a hole. I learned things by going out and having somebody teach them. So I’m reading, reading, reading. So yeah, most of them I already can pull something from places I’ve read and then — Yeah, I feel pretty confident I can pull that together. I’m excited, but it’s funny, because Candice told me I needed the exact same thing. She’s like, “You need some where were you just actually like list all the tools,” and she’s like, “Maybe at the end of each chapter.” I’m like, “Yeah, but then that brakes kind of the story flow, like I want them sucked into the story. I don’t want them to get to the end of the chapter and read a few tools and that keeps them from turning the page.” She’s like, “That’s true. Maybe can put them online or like at the end of the book or something.”

 

So what I like that too of like having that reference in the back and that will make the book a little longer, which I think will be nice. I think that’s good. Is that something — I mean, you said you’ll get it back to me in a few days, but I could probably start working on that now, just pulling it together.

 

[0:18:10.5] SC: Yeah, definitely. I did move some things around in — You’ll see. I mean, I really — Let’s talk about that for a second, sort of the narrative approach. So here’s another thing that an editor has to understand and integrate into their own toolbox, is they need to really think about the voice of the writer and the material that’s presented to them. That sounds like it’s so obvious, but I can’t tell you how many times in my own career when I’ve been presented with really interesting different ways of presenting information or story, and because I wasn’t familiar with that particular person’s point of view or their narrative approach, I would say, “No. No. No. No. No. No. You can’t do it like that. You’ve got to do it like this.” Then I would rip it apart and I would reconstitute it in a way that was like someone else, and that’s only natural because when you’re an editor, you’re really looking toward the masterwork. You’re saying to yourself, “How can I get this thing closer to the masterwork that I think best represents the epitome of this kind of book, this kind of genre, this kind of project?”

 

So in the back of my mind when you’re talking about this project two years ago, I was saying to myself, “Well, this is kind of a combination of The War of Art and Malcolm Gladwell. So that’s the way it should kind of read,” and when I was going through the book I was saying, “This aligns really, really well with The War of Art.” I can absolutely break this stuff into really good micro chapters that have a lot of really great cliffhangers at the end that will push the reader into the next chapter, because that’s the brilliance of The War of Art, is that it’s popcorn. Once you start reading in one chapter, you get sucked in and then you go, “Oh! Gees! The next chapter is only six paragraphs,” and then you read that, and so on and so on.

 

You’ve got to be a really, really good writer to be able to boil down a lot of stuff that — A lot of transitional material and just eliminated so that — A lot of people think, “Oh! That’s easy writing a book like The War of Art. It’s just really short,” but the reality is it moves from 60,000 words, to 40,000 words, to 30,000 words, to 20, all in Steve’s work.

 

[0:20:55.4] TG: Yeah. Quick sidebar, that reminds me of — Because one of the people I talk about in the book is Jason Fried, and another thing that he taught one time that I thought was fascinating is he’s like, “If I ever —” Oh! You know what I think I’ve mentioned it on here before, but he’s like, “If I ever teach a writing class, I’m going to have somebody — The first assignment is going to be write a five page paper. Then the second assignment is going to be rewrite that paper as a one-page paper and then rewrite it as a paragraph, then rewrite it as one sentence.” How going that direction is way harder than going the other direction. You can always add more to taking away and doing it correctly. That’s the hard part.

 

[0:21:37.3] SC: Yes. It really is. So anyway, just back to like, in my mind, the two masterworks I had in mind were The War of Art and The Tipping Point, and I know both books extremely well. I mean, it’s almost psychotic how well I know both books.

 

[0:21:56.9] TG: Almost, but not quite.

 

[0:21:59.3] SC: Almost. Not quite. Not quite. Your stuff, I’m like, “Yeah, I can totally wangle this into The War of Art format. I can cut a lot. I can really boil it down. I can break it into three books, like Steve’s. I’ve got conception. I know what the ending payoff is.” Then as I was working through it, I’m like, “You know what? Tim doesn’t have the psychological literature to back up all of this stuff. Oh, I know what I’ll do, I’ll just do what Gladwell did,” and what does Gladwell do? Gladwell, what he does is he brilliantly transitions into tangents, and then what he does in the tangent is he tells a micro story that boils down a 40-page really boring psychological research document into nine paragraphs, a beginning, middle and end of story.

 

So what I said to myself is, “I’ll just do that for Tim,” and then something struck me and that, “That’s not the way Tim is. Tim is not Malcolm Gladwell. Tim is not a New Yorker writer. Why do I want to make Tim a New Yorker writer when he’s not a New Yorker writer?” I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with New Yorker writers. They’re great, but that’s not who you are, and the people who like what you do aren’t looking for Malcolm Gladwell-esk material, right? They’re looking for Tim fumbling around, getting knocked down, slowly dragging his ass back up, finding the next thing. They want a guy literally early in the trenches, a guy who says, “I’m not really that book smart. I’m just tenacious. I just plug along and try and figure shit out as it hits me in the face.”

 

So if I started to transition in your book into this deep psychological research and talk about Nobel Prize winners, and Piaget, and Freud, and Jung and blah and — People are going to be really like, “I don’t want to read this. Why is Tim breaking up his great story about his wife not being able to pay for the groceries with Piaget? Who cares about Piaget? Get me back to the story.”

 

So that’s what I mean about narrative approach. You are not Malcolm Gladwell, nor should you be, and Malcolm Gladwell is not Tim Grahl, nor should he be. So when you’re an editor and you’re presented with material you have to say what makes sense and what doesn’t. What makes sense is that, I mean, organically you’re inspired by The War of Art. So you are attracted to the way The War of Art is structured. You’re actually write in that vernacular. You don’t write 9,000 word great essays that are really novels boiled down into 9,000 words. So that’s the other thing I had to figure out as the editor, because I kept saying, “You know what I’ll do? I’ll just break this down into The War of Art stuff and then I’ll go back and I’ll make Tim summarize 40 different psychological studies, and then will rip them up and will stick them back in the narrative.”

 

Then, instead, you had somebody like Candice go, “Oh, just stick that in the appendix in the back.” So it took me like three weeks to figure out what Candice figured out in five seconds, but I figured it out and that’s good. So that’s the other thing you have to think about when you’re editing somebody else’s work or your own work. If you’re editing your own work and you go, “You know what? This doesn’t sound really that smart. I’m really not coming off like Malcolm Gladwell here. So maybe I should go and try and be like Malcolm Gladwell and add that stuff.” That should be a red flag in your mind when you start saying, “This doesn’t read like the best things I think are great.”

 

Now that doesn’t mean you allow the structure to fly off the handle and that you don’t follow the rules, because you’re just above the rules, because you’re a creative genius and people need to recognize your brilliance. No. It doesn’t mean that at all. What it does mean is don’t put a square peg in a round — What is it? A square peg in a round hole? Find out the strengths of the stuff that you do. Highlight those and don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater and try and be something you’re not.

 

So my point is is that as I was editing your work, I’m like, “There’s no way I should break up this story, because this story is really compelling because I know tons of people will really, really relate to it because you don’t pull punches. You don’t say this is easy. You don’t say, “Oh! Once I figured this out, then everything was fine.” No. It’s like, “Once I figured this out, I thought everything was going to be fine, and then I got hit with another sledgehammer. Oh my gosh! What am I going to do? This stuff just keeps piling up,” and that’s the brilliance of your book, is that, yeah, it’s not easy. It’s not even close to easy for you and people are going to relate to that. They’re going to be like, “Damn right it’s not easy.” Wow! That’s right. Oh my gosh! This guy is actually telling the truth. He’s really laying it on the line. He’s  not whitewashing stuff to make him feel like he’s a lot smarter than I am,” and it’s a real attribute to know the work that we did over two years, and especially to you to be able to say, “You know what? I am not going to lie. There was a guy who came. There was an IRS sheriff who came to collect my money with a warrant, and I’m going to let people know that, because that happens to people. It might not happen to everybody, but that’s a pretty big slap in the face and it’s something very difficult to handle. You know what? I got through it. So that’s not who I am. That’s something that happened to me and it’s something that I beat and it’s something that I still think about because I don’t want it to happen again, and I learned from it.”

 

We all make mistakes. It’s like whether or not you change yourself. After you made the mistake is the important part. We can all cry in our beer until we’re blue in the face through all of the horrible things that had happened to us, because everybody’s got a really horrific series of events that have happened to them over their lives whether or not they said, “Yeah, that was tough. I got through it though, and more stuff is in my future. That’s going to be even probably as challenging. But you know what? I got through that. I can get through the other thing. If I can’t, I’ll ask for help,” and that’s what I think your book is really about. It’s like there are things that are going to hit you, you don’t see coming. Know that.

 

That’s why I think breaking up the really nice almost memoirish element of this book would be a huge mistake. Now I’m going to circle back to what I started at the beginning of this, which was when people ask me, “How do I break the rules? When do you know you can break the rules?” and when you know you can break the rules is when you understand that the story always wins. The story always wins, and especially a nonfiction. Like our friend Joe Bunting once asked me, “Hey, do you really need all that story stuff for nonfiction?” And it was just the first I met him and I’m like, “Joe, it’s more important for a nonfiction than fiction.” He was like, “Oh, I guess I’ll stay and actually listen to what you have to say, because I only write nonfiction,” and it’s true, because if you let the story, if you follow the story, it’s like following the money in Watergate. If you follow the story in nonfiction, you can find yourself being able to break the rules.

 

So that’s what I mean when you just dump it in the appendix at the end, like, “Okay. Here’s the how to stuff with the scientific backup. There you go. Because I think the story works so well,” but if you don’t have the scientific backup and you don’t have the list of tools, then people will go, “Oh, that’s just some memoir about some guy who published his first book and went through a lot of trials and tribulations. It was okay.”

 

[0:31:02.0] TG: Yeah, because my vacillation is between feeling like this is the best thing I’ve ever written, and then feeling like this is a shitty memoir about a rich white guy that had some trouble, and then or I vacillate to like this is like the worst version of a Buddhist learning about myself book. It’s like I just struggle with like, “Oh my gosh! This is like I’m going to share all my secrets and at the end it’s going to be like, “Okay. So what? You had some trouble.”

 

That’s where I get really up in my head about it, and I mean the only way I calm down is like Shawn will tell me if it sucks. Shawn will tell me if it sucks. He’ll just let me know.” Because those are my things, is like is there anything special about this story? Is there anything special about this book? Is there really going to be in this? I know everything’s already been done before. So I don’t think I’m doing something brand-new, but at the same time I don’t want it to just end up in the Walmart DVD bin where all the shitty movies end up for 499, because they’re all kind of the same. Yeah, I’m trying to trust the process in this and not let that spin me into a black hole, but those are the things I worry about what I am trying to go to sleep at night.

 

[0:32:39.9] SC: Yeah, that’s only natural and that’s — I think those thoughts — I talk a lot about how people try to get published for all the wrong reasons. They want validation and all that stuff. But you know that? Validation is really important and there’s nothing wrong with getting it. So part of what publishers deliver to writers, and this is why a lot of people just really want to be published by Random House or HarperCollins or whatever.

 

What they say to them is that, “Wow! Your thing is valuable, and it’s valuable not just to yourself, but we think it’s valuable for a lot of people.” So, yes, I serve that sort of, for lack of a better term, gatekeeper role for you, and it’s an important thing to get, because, yeah, I’m not your mom. I’m not your friend, really. I mean, we weren’t friends before we started working together. I’m just a guy who I’m looking for products in the most crass way, not the most crass way. What I mean is, if I’m looking at my livelihood as a series of choices to put more money in my bank account so I can have a better life and my family can have a better life, then yes, I’m very discriminating about stuff that I’m going to spend time on. It’s important that writers do get people to say, “You know what? I’m going to put $50 on red, on your book, because I think it could hit — I think the roulette wheel could fall on it.” I can’t tell whether or not I’m right. All I can say is that I’m a really good handicapper. I know story structure. I add a lot of tools into my chest to know when things are better than other things. So I can ignore 95%, 96% of the stuff that comes over the transom to me. Actually, it’s probably 99.9.

 

So when you say I worry about it being this and that and the other thing, yeah, you should worry about that, but not when you have an editor who says, “You know what? I’m going to bet on this. I’m going to actually ask my business partner who I’ve worked with years on numerous bestsellers that we both have benefited from. I’m going to say to him, “I think this guy, Tim, has s written something that we can make some clams off of. Do you want to take a look at it?” He goes, “Yeah, I think we can make a few clams off of this thing. It’s pretty good.”

 

You not only got my validation, and we got Kelly too. Kelly read it too, and Kelly is like the best third-party person, because she’s like, “I don’t know if I want to work on a book that’s not good.” She definitely doesn’t want to work on a book that’s not good. She’s like, Yeah, I can definitely see how to market this. I know how to work it. We’re going to position it like this, and Steve you’re going to do this. Right, Steve?” “Well, okay.”

 

You’ve got Kelly me and Steve, and I don’t think you’re going to really do much better than that, because we actually have theories about why we like things. We parse this stuff like crazy. So will your book perform like The War of Art or The Tipping Point? I don’t know. Probably doubtful, but if somebody buys this book and reads it, I’m going to be able to feel good that they got something out of it and so should you. Chances are they will. If they’re smart, they will, because they’ll say to themselves, “Oh, okay. If somebody like Tim Grahl can do it, I can do it too,” and that’s why we write things, because we want to give other people stories they can use in their own lives to make them better, either prescriptive stories that say, “Here’s all the mistakes that I made that I learned from. Here are all the answers to the test, or cautionary tales, like don’t do this because it’s going to cause a lot of negative energy in the world and it’s a no good way of living. Those are value-based moral judgments in a very difficult complex world that a lot of people say has no morality to it. I don’t agree with that. I think our universe, it has a moral element to it and that’s what stories do. They teach us. They did give us pathways and frameworks to make our lives better.”

 

So I think your book is really terrific and I’m glad Candice figured out what took me three weeks and has already told you what you had to do anyway. Again, I think we’re absolutely on the right track, and that’s it. Do you have any other questions for me this week?

 

[0:37:53.9] TG: No. I think that’s good. So I’m going to start kind of working and pulling together the appendix that we talked about, and then once you get me the manuscript, I’ll dive into that as well and then will get this thing locked by the end of the month hopefully.

 

[END OF EPISODE]

 

[0:38:09.6] TG: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. As I mentioned last week, there are two cool things going on that I wanted to mention. The first is that we put up a brand-new storygrid.com website. We’ve tried to make the site a little easier to find what you’re looking for, and just overall more pretty and more functional. So make sure you go over to storygrid.com and check that out.

 

Also, if you’re going to look at the behind-the-scenes on how I’m planning to launch running down a dream, all the marketing side of things. On this podcast, Shawn and I are talking mostly about the editorial and publishing side. If you want to learn about the marketing and launch side, I’m covering all of that on my other podcasts, a book launch show, and you can find that at booklaunchshow.com.

 

So, as always, thanks for being a part of our Story Grid community, subscribing to this podcasts and listening every week. If you want to support the show, tell another author about the show and you can leave a rating and review on Apple Podcast, but thanks again for being a part of Story Grid, and we will see you next week.

 

[END]

 

The Book

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First Time Writer

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Resources

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