after running my youtube-channel self-publishing with Dale for the past
two and a half years I've discovered there's many great indie authors that
yet to be discovered so that's why I thought I would start an indie author
spotlight so it's with great pleasure that I introduce to you someone that I
am a personal fan of and one of my favorites and I believe that you will
enjoy them too so make sure that you stick around
welcome to self-publishing with Dale where you'll learn how to publish books
that sell and build an unstoppable brand today is the first segment in the indie
author stories series and it's with great pleasure that introduced to you
somebody that I consider very much awesome the self-publishing space his
name is Michael Laurent Michael Laurent is the host of author level up on
YouTube where every week he publishes videos to help you write better write
faster have fun and be prolific he's written over 40 books in his videos
document when he's learned every step of the way if he caught my YouTube video
about 10 best YouTube channels for learning how to self publish in 2017
then you know I'm a huge fan of Michael's and that's what brings him to
the show today so without any further ado let's get on over to the live
segment welcoming to the show and the new show here on Facebook live none
other than one of my favorites Michael Laurent Michael how do you feel a man I
am fantastic I'm feeling like a guinea pig tonight yeah the first indie author
spotlight we're doing Facebook live we're trying some new technology stuff
and it's gone swimmingly well so far tonight
yes you know well it went live automatically I forgot it goes right
live on the hour and I was just like we're just gonna go ahead and talk so if
some of you guys caught us behind the scenes you know knuckle deep in our
noses we're sorry about that I was gonna say if you heard those curse words just
ignore them are you capable of cursing Michael I've never heard you say a curse
word I occasionally you know I stubbed my toe or you know I'll I'll
pick the wrong ter all over steep mighty those sorts of things then you'll hear
me curse but generally I try to keep it g-rated that's good always happens yeah
for sure but you know we're gonna have a little bit of fun today
I've already see that we have a few people in the live chat right now so I
want to give a big shout out to a few of them I see Marc Brown Lass's in the
house my brother none other than Walter
Roberts in the house I got a few brothers by the way so I had
to be very specific about the brother that was here
Kathy Mankins here and if you happen to be popping in you got questions for
Michael please load him up this guy has been around this industry a little
longer than me and he has a little bit more insights in the indie publishing
community so are you ready for this Michael I've got a few questions and
hopefully you had a chance to kind of breeze through those yes I am ready and
welcome to all the viewers glad to have all you guys with us and let's let's get
to it you're like a pro man I don't know I try
yeah way more pro than I am oh yeah you were talking about the whole inception
thing here in Facebook where it's just like zooms inside slobs is inside
Facebook so that was our little inside Shack but enough about that tell us a
little bit about your background in writing sure so I got started just like
everyone probably watching this and listening to this got started is I was a
kid you know writing on construction paper as a kid you know I I wrote my
parents out of house and home is what I like to say and you know I always wanted
to be a writer yeah I think a lot of people can identify with that and I had
done it a little bit in middle school did a little bit in high school and got
to college and I decided that I wanted to go down the literary fiction route I
wanted to write the most beautiful sentences known to mankind I wanted to
spend hours and hours on my manuscripts and get to the point where I was 65
years old and be able to retire because I wrote that one best-selling novel that
everyone you know acclaim before and lo and behold that didn't work out so
well no no publisher wanted to look at my stuff you know I broke manuscripts
agents wouldn't touch me publishers wouldn't touch me lit mags
wouldn't touch me and so I got discouraged you know I mean it it's it's
the it's a natural thing right I mean you write tons and tons and tons and no
one you're just not seeing any benefit from it and so I kind of decided to kind
of give up and in 2012 my life changed forever so I was on a nice dinner with
my wife and I felt ill later that night with what I thought was food poisoning
lo and behold it was food poisoning but I didn't leave the hospital for a month
so when I was in the hospital I picked up something I picked up an infection
that basically could have been life-threatening for me and so I
remember very vividly being on my hospital bed with a IV in my arm I'm
doped up on morphine and I'm having hallucinations the funniest
hallucinations you'll ever think of and I just thinking what am I doing with my
life you know what what is it that that
drives me I'm literally probably on my deathbed and and what am I gonna do
what's gonna change moving forward and so I swore on that hospital bed right
then and there that I would become a writer no matter what and that I would
bend the universe around me to be successful and so that's when I decided
to get out of hospital and I covered and I let all that perfectionism go from the
literary fiction route just let it go I mean nothing nothing changes your habits
faster than staring death in the face and so I decided to jump into little
commercial fiction which is what I enjoyed reading the most and decided to
become a self-published writer and haven't looked back man it's so funny I
literally covered the very next question of you know why did you decide to go
independent when publishing books and this is so cool so I think it's probably
good that I bring up do you think and you see I see a lot of people that want
to go to the traditional publishing route and the reason they always say is
because if you do indie publishing or self-publishing that it's indicated
that's an inferior product versus something in traditional publishing
what's your stance on that do you think that your book has
suffered or your books I should say since you have over 40 of them do you
think they have suffered from being indy published versus if they were
traditionally published not at all no in fact I highly doubt that a publisher
would have looked at anything that I wrote during my first few years as an
author I highly doubt that they would look at anything that I'm writing now
they have a very narrow view of what they think a book should be and it's not
to dig them and in that they reproduce what's successful and what makes money
for them but I found that growing up particularly as an african-american boy
that I didn't see representation or people that look like me when I grew up
you know when I was reading books growing up and I still don't think
that's really the case with a lot of traditional publishers and so what I
would have loved to have seen is someone who looked like me writing books on a
regular basis with characters that look like me with backgrounds that were
similar to mine and you just don't see that still today in traditional
publishing and so I love self-publishing because it gives me the freedom to write
whatever I want to write and whenever I want to write it on my own terms and let
the market decide on you know who's gonna be successful in what books they
want to buy that's really cool and you've been hanging around since 2012
then that's it was a good reason why you have over 40 books then yeah yeah yeah I
published my first book in 2014 and I decided you know I'm just gonna gonna go
all into this and I'm gonna figure out how to be as efficient as possible
figure out how to save as much time as possible and you know I've managed to do
all this man with with a full-time job a young daughter I have a four year old
daughter who was born same year I published my first book and I even
attend law school classes in the evenings and so I've learned how to do
all this and balance all this you know on kind of a shoestring with no time and
and all that so I've kind of figured out if I if I can learn how to do this and I
think anyone can figure it out yeah this it's incredible you really are the you
epitomized what indie publishing is all about it's trying to just make
can't work and with a part-time schedule no less you are a person that I said
before we connected here you are very Google I could literally find you just
about any like Michael Laurent oh there's a thousand choices to choose
from and we're gonna talk about a few of those things in just a moment I found
something very interesting and you and I were having a personal conversation I
think it was about a month ago and you haven't just wrote in one niche you've
done many niches do you care to share some of those niches which ones were
successful which ones weren't so successful for you yeah you bet so I've
written in the science fiction and fantasy genres I've also done some
nonfiction for writers and then under a pen name that I really don't talk about
too much I've done some poetry Rezo yeah I've done poetry so I enjoy it
I I try to write I didn't do it this year but I try to write around one
poetry collection a year it's just kind of fun it's it slows down the pace it's
a little bit different but that was not very successful and not not a very
successful niche for me but I do just because I enjoyed it and it's a kind of
a break from you know YouTube and fiction and nonfiction I would say my
most successful niches have been space opera so I have a nine book space opera
series called Galaxie Mavericks that is done really well for me I've also been
successful with urban fantasy so my buddy Justin Sloan and I we wrote a
urban fantasy thriller type book and it's called modern necromancy and it's
about a necromancer who's basically chasing a madman around the world to
save the world and and stop him from unleashing an army of the Dead
on the world and that has been a super successful endeavor for both myself and
Justin and then I've also done some dark fantasy as well I have a series called
The Last Dragon Lord and it's about an evil dragon Lord and you know
bloodthirsty and revenge and all that fun stuff and that's that's been pretty
successful for me and I've also done nonfiction for writers so I have some
books for writers to help them get better at the craft help them learn how
to be more professional help them learn how to navigate the
that the murky waters of self-publishing and that has been fairly successful for
me too I feel kind of bad because I've watched
a lot of your YouTube videos in fact I consumed a lot of it while you were on
hiatus that's literally when I stumbled on you
came up and I'm like wow he hasn't published anything in a long time and I
started consuming it a lot so I was not aware that you actually had a nonfiction
series based on writing itself so can we find that over and say Amazon store or
elsewhere yep it's under the pen name ml Ron so I like to keep my fiction in my
nonfiction separate so if you search for ml and then Ron ro and n you'll find
them and you can also find all the non-fiction books I have an author level
up calm which is the name of my youtube channel so it's all there easy easy for
you to find that's really really cool why did you choose a different name for
your nonfiction and your fiction I like to keep them separate so you know
there's something to the idea that readers get analysis paralysis if you
give them too many choices if you show them too many different things that are
different they don't know where to start especially if they're there on a place
like Amazon and so I made the conscious decision to write all of my fiction or
most of my fiction under Michael Laurent and so all of my covers have the same
brand so if you look at any of my covers you know it's a Michael Ron cover
because my name is really big at the top yeah and then I've got you know some
some things with all my covers that make them look very distinct and incohesive
so that way if readers are looking at my books in fiction they know okay this is
my Quran this is a fiction book it's science fiction or it's fantasy super
clear right in so for my nonfiction I've also got some non-fiction books where
those are branded differently and so you can look at my email Ron books and you
you can kind of know right then in there that these are non-fiction books for
writers so for me it was a very conscious marketing decision and just
helping create create those clear choices for my readers now of the two I
imagine in police correct me if I'm wrong I assume that your fiction brand
is probably doing a little bit better than your nonfiction brand
it's about it's fun equal really okay cool it's about equal so my nonfiction
you know I I started my youtube channel back in 2015 and you know I really
didn't do much with it I released a lot of videos but for really it was really
an experiment you know and so I went on a hiatus just cuz I had some things
going on in my life you know after about a year and a half and I just came back
within the last six months and so my YouTube channel is now starting to pick
up a lot of steam and so my nonfiction is doing much better than it had had
been in the past and so it's starting to get to the level where it's it's about
it's about ready to surpass my fiction but but not quite yeah yeah it's it's a
fantastic channel anybody gets the opportunity go check out there's a good
reason why I'm a huge fan of his work it's super professional everything's
dialed in it was how I actually modeled a lot of what I was doing on in my early
films art Hill early films early videos I watched yours and I was like okay I
can tell he's got it scripted and I like that it feels more like a newscast
versus just like a vlog of some sort and so I always loved that that content but
I want to kind of dive in just a little bit deeper here
let's do who are your writing influences who are the people that you look to and
say that person inspired me to become a writer and they continue to influence
you now sure so I my influences come from lifestyle and productivity more so
than actual writing style so my top influences would be in no particular
order Michael Crichton Jurassic Park was just
an incredible book I mean just incredibly written just it just made me
envious just made me want to quit I just I just couldn't do it anymore I was like
okay this is this book is just so good that I'll never top this so Michael
Crichton pretty much anything he's written it's
just been fantastic Ray Bradbury he's the one that made me
want to be a writer so I actually dedicated my first book to Ray Bradbury
for that very reason so anything Ray Bradbury's written his
short stories Fahrenheit 451 the Martian Chronicles all that stuff is just you
know I love Ray Bradbury's work and then for the
that he was so prolific Robert Louis Stevenson so he's the guy there at
Treasure Island so in addition to Treasure Island being a fantastic book
if you look at Robert Louis Stevenson's life he was incredibly prolific I mean
this is a guy that wrote book after book after book and they were just all
incredible I mean he wrote he wrote Jekyll and Hyde Europe Treasure Island
he broke books about like the War of the Roses you know novels it took place
during that and everything he did was always different but it always felt like
a Robert Lewis Stevenson novel and so his model of productivity and how
productive he was was inspiring to me I feel like I'm I'm drawn toward prolific
personalities as I tend I tend to be a pretty prolific person and so I really
admired those writers they can really just sit down and write book after book
after book and just create these amazing experiences and so Michael Crichton Ray
Bradbury Robert Lewis Stevenson all probably some of the most prolific
writers in history that's so cool so you'd like to see that volume of
literature it's kind of one of those proof and validation of author making it
to you it's not so much proof validation of them making it it's I am drawn to
people that love to listen to their inner spirit so there's something about
Ray Bradbury I mean near the end of his life I mean he was writing a short story
a day in a you know Ray Bradbury has that famous challenge of a you know I
dare you to write a short story every week for a year and you can't write a
bad one you know you can't write 50 to bad short stories there's got to be at
least one good one in there somewhere right and so just that ability to listen
to themselves and just charge through and just create content even if people
are gonna laugh at them you know there's just something very bold and brave and
courageous about that that I admire that's really cool I like I like deep
digging deep on that one all right we're gonna shift gears a little bit let's go
back to YouTube why did you start to do a YouTube channel I know my reasons but
I need to kind of figure out you know you weren't just sitting around one day
we're like I like writing I'm gonna go ahead and no you do general
yeah it was more of an experiment so you know we've all heard the advice you know
you need to be everywhere yeah authors have to be everywhere
that's bogus advice by the way bogus advice but I followed it and so I was
everywhere so right around this time was when I went all into Google+ will miss
you asked me about my biggest mistake that's probably in the top ten didn't go
anywhere I mean you know Guy Kawasaki wrote that book that everybody talked
about and everyone jumped in that didn't work and so I what am I gonna do what
what what's gonna be my social media network and so I was kind of looking at
YouTube and I thought well this is kind of a social media network but it's also
a search engine so what if I could create a YouTube channel for writers
that talked about how my process and how I do things what would that what would
that look like and so I decided to try on a whim like you'll you'll learn when
you hang around me almost everything I do is an experiment like I have no real
every book I write I have no expectations of any book that I write I
just do it because it's just something that I want to try and if it succeeds
awesome I'm going to learn from that if it doesn't then I'm gonna learn from
that too and it's gonna help me with the next book and so I was like okay well
what if I had this crazy idea to do a YouTube channel
that where it kind of looks like the Apple commercials where you got that
real nice white background you know and yes what would that look like and so I
did that and I shot all those videos on my smartphone and I would shoot three
videos a week just to see what happened yeah and the response was like that was
like the it was like a decision I made on a whim and it was actually probably
one of the best decisions that I ever made as a writer and I found that those
tend to be the decisions that tend to be your best ones but yeah you do and you
don't think about it yet you know you can have these other decisions where you
spend all this time thinking about it I got it is gonna be the best book watch
ever it's gonna be the best best book ever man people are gonna they're gonna
bow down and just you know shoot me boatloads of money
sound the alarm he cursed that curse flop is a curse oh I meant to say
shipped Oh exactly I'm sorry continue no notes so so so it was a whim decision
honestly I didn't think anything would come out of it I just wanted to try it
and I found that blogging I sucked at it I just it's just
blogging is not my spirit animal podcasting I done podcasting off and on
and you know I enjoyed it but I didn't necessarily have I didn't want to do an
interview podcast so it just wasn't my thing and so I was like well I'll try
video I'm the most introverted person on the planet but maybe video might work
and turns out that was exactly like that was that was exactly what I needed
that's that was the best way for me to express myself was through video and I
would have never known that's a long answer to your short question no no and
with a brief like interruption on my part of thinking that you're cursing
you're actually just you know I didn't hear properly I need to adjust my
hearing aids here just a second I'll let you believe I cursed it's all good maybe
you'll get a maybe we'll get a curse word out of me before Rover nice there
we go hey hey not a problem I don't think Facebook's gonna be monetized Mia
so we're good to go has the YouTube channel helped you in
gaining exposure for your fiction and of course your nonfiction brands yeah two
words Joanna pin so yes about Joanna pen so Joanna pan saw some of my youtube
videos a couple years ago and so she shot me a message on Twitter and said
hey I love your videos I would love for you to come on
you know podcast and talk about YouTube for writers and after I picked myself
off the floor I was like okay awesome yeah I would love to love to do this and
so I went on her show and I'll talk about my process of the things that I
learned and you know I was very very not very far into my youtube journey yet but
a lot of people got a lot of benefit out of it and you know she sent so many
people my way was just unreal and so that game
all kinds of exposure for my videos you know my aunt for the first time ever I
was actually making money on Adsense and it started it just didn't stop and so I
was like okay well what else can I do and so I started doing more videos per
week and and then I started to find that some of the videos that I was doing were
ranking in search so I have a video called how to outline your novel ten
ways and that's my most successful video of all time Wow
it it just it's crazy even when I was on a hiatus that video was still getting
views and people were emailing me asking kind of where I was and you know like I
said it's things that you you do and you don't think about yeah that often had
the biggest impact so yeah it definitely definitely
elevated my exposure to my brand and so now now that I'm back on YouTube and I'm
all in on it yeah I'm writing nonfiction books and
I'm publishing them so for example I have a book coming out probably next
week because my editor just emailed me just as I said that last sentence I have
a book coming out next week called how to write your first novel so people
email me all the time and they ask me how do you write a novel and so I said
okay well I'm just gonna come up with a book and I'm gonna write a book about
how to write your first novel and so that's coming out next week and so
that's something that I can promote on the channel and that will elevate my
sales and you know help people that that need that help and yeah YouTube has been
just a phenomenal blessing for me nice yeah it's it's really I'm always
impressed with the quality of content that you're producing all the time and
you're very cerebral about how you approach a lot of the the resources and
tools that you provide on there so that's one of the things I enjoy I just
enjoy nerding out about some things you know like you were weighing in on things
like gravity and pro writing 8 I thought that was very fascinating by the way
anybody gets the opportunity we're not going to share the story here go over to
author level up you have to find out why he went on highest Michael you can't
tell them here they got to go over to YouTube channel and actually find out
why you went on hiatus it is stranger than fiction for real man so what advice
do you have for aspiring author and some people that haven't actually
hit the publish yet they're like they're writing great content there they're
really trying to just edge some good stuff out but they haven't hit that
publish yet mm-hmm I have a couple of examples I can give you if I may so you
know Steve Harvey write famous American comedian super funny guy he does
inspirational videos on the side and he has a video and I forget the name of it
but he it's him he's kind of he's kind of in his office and he's just sitting
in chill and and he's he's talking about taking that leap of faith even if you
don't know how to do it and he equates it to you standing on the edge of a
cliff with a parachute on your back just jump just do it your parachute will will
will open you know when you're in the air but you have to make that jump you
have to take that leap of faith and trust that it will open if you don't do
that you're just gonna be standing on that cliff and you're gonna watch all
these other happy people breeze on by with their parachutes and I've always
thought that that was a just a fantastic metaphor for why aspiring authors just
need to jump off that cliff and open up their parachutes that's my first piece
of advice my second piece of advice for aspiring writers would be advice so
there's a lot of BS out there let's just let's just be honest did you hear me
yeah there's a lot of BS out there right there's a lot of disreputable service
providers and and a lot of people that are just just they're just fleecing
authors they're just taking advantage of people you know and and there are other
people out there who are giving really good advice freely but that advice may
not necessarily be relevant for you in your situation so my advice is to
remember that there are three types of advice
there's advice that's meant for you there's advice that's not meant for you
and there's advice that you're not ready for yet and so the difference between a
new writer and a more experienced writer is just developing that BS detector to
look at the advice and be able to piece out the bits that work best
for you so if I told you Dale that you should get all your books published
through Ingram spark Ingram spark is fantastic right yeah there are a
fantastic service that makes sense if book if print is part of your strategy
if you wanted to get into bookstores and libraries that would be a perfect
example of advice that's meant for you if I told you on the other hand that I
think Dale that you should get all of your books published in Spanish because
Spanish is the next biggest language and you write poetry that's probably not
advice that's meant for you you know that that's not good advice I mean it
might be good for the person that gave it but that's not gonna be relevant for
you in your situation but they're gonna sell it to you as if it is right and if
I gave you advice that you're not ready for classic example as someone told me
five years ago that you need to hire a virtual assistant you will not be able
to survive if you do not hire a virtual assistant and so back in 2014 I wasn't
ready for that I mean I have any money you know who am i gotta hire a virtual
assistant with what am I gonna do I mean what am I gonna do barter with him that
that it didn't apply to me at that time but now I'm starting to build a team
that you know I that I pay part-time to help me edit my videos to help me with
some things that I just don't have time for and when it was given to me that was
advice that I wasn't ready for yet but I'm ready for it now and so think about
that when you're developing that BS detector as well that's really cool
that's very very sage advice I have oftentimes see I have a ton of backlog
in videos and sometimes there are newbies that will approach a video and
for instance a newbie will go oh should I publish on publish Drive or should I
publish on draft2digital and they're getting overwhelmed and I'm like okay
this is kind of advanced type stuff I would recommend you do this so yeah
you're so right you hit the nail on the head this is one I need to snip and put
a clip up so that everybody kind of understands that not all the advice that
I dispense it's going to be tailored for you exactly excellent I love it man
what was one of your biggest mistakes you already kind of covered one of them
Google one of my biggest mistakes Google+ I would say you know do you want
it do you want an example that's relevant more to fiction writers or do
you want one that's relevant more to like nonfiction give me uh give me your
best one just go with your gut on this my best mistake okay so my best miss my
best mistake was thinking that people wanted to to engage with every single
piece of content that I created so when I first started I I had this really
bright idea Dale so when I launched my YouTube channel I also launched a
podcast and I also was launching my blogs and so I decided I'm gonna do all
of this at once and so I had a podcast and it was called driving with Michael
and I'm not making this up I would go to the gym and I would put my cell phone on
my dashboard of my car and I would talk about whatever was on my mind and so I
just talked about random stuff I talked about gyms I talked about working out I
talked about all kinds of stuff that had no relevance at all to any anyone that
will want to listen to anything I had to say in fact I got 13 readers or 13
listeners for a like all time for one of my episodes and so I I just didn't
understand that and so what I've learned over the years is that you have to
create that emotional connection with people like you have to tell them you're
why you know simon Sinek famous TED talk he always said you know people don't
care about what you do until they know why you do it and so that was my biggest
mistake early on was because I thought I knew what people wanted I thought I
thought they wanted to content but what they really wanted was to learn more
about me and I didn't get that to them I just gave them the content and it was
dry and it was stilted and I didn't have an author voice and you know when I was
podcasting and doing social media and all that other stuff and so it fell flat
and so now how I've become successful is creating that emotional connection and
showing people that this is who I am this is what I stand for
this is what I believe here's my personality you can see me you can hear
me you can make your own decisions about whether
you want to continue to engage with my content but I'm always gonna be real and
so that has served me very well and it's something I didn't do very early on in
my career Wow it's that's really good advice and I
swear to you it's almost like you were describing my exact story this is really
good all right well hey we're gonna start to wrap things up but before we -
now how can our audience get a hold of you well you can find me at my website
author level up calm that's where you can find out more about my youtube
channel get links to all my videos and links to all my writing books for
nonfiction you know for writers and writing craft and all that stuff if
you're interested in my fiction in anything that I've had to say for my
fiction today you can visit me at Michael or on Comm you can find links to
all my books and and all the things that I'm currently up to wonderful very good
hey it's been a true pleasure to have you on here and we broke ground it looks
like everything was going pretty good I've noticed a few people kind of
engaging we've actually had a few viewers and Kathy Mankin says what does
BS mean what does that stand for Michael I see I I think I think it means
bullshit sue I don't know we may have to consult a dictionary Kathy I don't know
she's like she's like reeling it in I was like what's she saying over here
I've been if you notice me looking off to the side I'm like looking at the
comments and such over here so it's really been a fantastic time here I want
to make sure and if any of you right now are watching this over in the
self-publishing Books group and I don't see your comments unfortunately if we
are in the actual sub polishing with Dale like page here on Facebook so with
that being said we're gonna continue this in the author a spotlight series
and I'm glad Michael that you decided to I shouldn't say decided that kind of
threw him and it's like one of my news experiments I threw it against the wall
to see if it's thick and Michael was like let's do it so like 10 minutes
before he's like oh hey let's try this yeah
yep oddly enough I had actually planned this probably about a couple weeks ago
I'd send it out in the emails and I was like you know what let's try out Michael
but I would love to if you get the opportunity to bring you over to the
YouTube channel and I want to talk to you a little bit more about your
experience with the Alliance of independent authors because I know that
you have some experience there so I would like to know a little bit more
about that so do you think you'd be game for doing that
oh absolutely any time and it's been my pleasure and I appreciate you having me
on the show well fantastic well folks if you enjoyed today's video content do me
a favor hit that thumbs up right here in the Facebook and make sure that you
click the little like on this page and hit the follow so you see it first and
you won't miss a single in the author spotlight series and if you are an indie
author please feel free to reach out to me in the mean time but it between times
it's been self-publishing with Dale and my good friend Michael Laurent over here
and we're gonna peace out folks
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