How to Get Started Writing a Book

Today we're going to talk about what it takes to get your idea out in a book form. Are you ready? Because it's time.

You're listening to the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast, part of the TCD Podcast Network.

Hey heroes, my name is Tom Pounder and this is the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast. This is the podcast where I bring on ministry leaders and we talk about how to do ministry more effectively in this very digital and online world. And today I have my friend Robert Carnes on. And Robert is a great guy. He's got a church communication background and now works with marketing. But he's actually published three. Actually, he's on number three right now. He's releasing number three right now. And he's taken some ideas that he's had and put it into book form he's done self-publishing but now he's got a publishing house that is publishing his current book and we talk about the process of what it takes to get that idea out on paper and out in a book form what does it look like what are some hindrances what are some ways that you can overcome that i'm really excited to have this conversation with robert but before we get into that i do want to highlight the church digital at the church.digital We have lots of great podcasts and blogs, coaching and cohorts to help you in your online ministry, your digital ministry, and your metaverse ministry. So if you want some encouragement, if you want some hope to get through in your online ministry, to be more effective today than it was yesterday, you definitely have to check out thechurch.digital. So do that today. All right, so let's get into the conversation right now with Robert Carnes, talk about how to publish your book. All right, with me right now is my friend, Robert Carnes. Robert, how are you, man?

I'm good, Tom. Glad to be back on the podcast.

Yeah, I'm glad to have you back on. We've got some good stuff to talk about today, but just to kind of hit us off a little bit, you're really good because your sports teams are doing quite well at this moment. So talk to me. I mean, you're a big Georgia Bulldogs fan. And I forget, did you go to Georgia?

I did graduate from UGA. They were pretty good in football back then, but... I think even better right now. So yeah, I'm a little happy with the state of sports in Georgia right now.

You should be. I mean, definitely. Georgia, I was just talking to one of my daughters the other day. Georgia's right up there with Alabama right now. And so, and that's hard to come by. But I mean, I think Georgia's got some good staying power and they're going to be in there for quite some time now.

I hope so. And I hope I'm trying not to make this be the entire topic of the podcast because we could talk about sports for quite a bit. Maybe we'll have a whole nother episode. That's all we talk about. But living in Atlanta, there are quite a few Alabama Crimson Tide fans. And they are still definitely the, I don't know, the big dogs in the land. They're still a really good football team. So we have to respect them. But I hope that Georgia can continue to make it more of a two-sided rivalry rather than Nick Saban continuing to beat up on us every single year.

Yeah, well, that's true, too. Well, and then you have the Atlanta Braves, who are the defending World Series champions, and they're making their big, strong playoff push. They might, I mean, at this time, they're really close to the Mets if they haven't overtaken them yet.

We were, this changes daily now, because you're right. It's getting really close. We were tied for first place in the NL East yesterday. The Mets played a doubleheader and won them both. So they're a half a game up right now, but it's a competitive...

Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's coming down to the wire and it's fun to, to see my team again, pressure's off because we won the world series last year, but it's always fun to see them do well. And they're an exciting team to watch.

So that's, that's where I felt like with the nationals, when they won the world series is that pressure's off now we're done, but now they've gone completely. Now they're just terrible. They're in a complete rebuild now. So hopefully your Braves don't have to do that.

Yeah, I feel for you guys, especially losing Juan Soto because he was so fun to watch and he was not fun to watch because he was an opponent of ours. But yeah, I think you guys will hopefully be able to rebuild and come back from the bottom of the division soon.

I hope so too. Well, again, like you said, we could talk about this is my probably most favorite time of the year sports-wise because you have playoff baseball and you have the start of professional but also college football. I love college football more than I do like pro football. All right, so let's get into this right now. Again, Robert, you've been on my podcast a number of times, but just in case someone doesn't know who you are, briefly share about who you are and what you do.

Yeah, absolutely. So I started out in the church communications world as a director of communications for a couple churches here in Atlanta, wearing all the many, many hats that a church communicator does. I did essentially the same thing for a couple different nonprofits in Atlanta, including Orange, which many church leaders are probably familiar with. It was kind of a... an editor and a marketer for them uh and since then have now worked for an agency in atlanta doing digital marketing so a lot of the same type of stuff everything from social media websites email marketing blogging i mean my my favorite thing is probably content creation especially from the writing standpoint which we will obviously get into later in this conversation but yeah i also do a lot of stuff freelance writing, as well as doing a little bit of book publishing. So it keeps me quite busy. It's a lot of fun stuff, but I really enjoy this kind of thing, especially getting to work with a lot of really cool organizations.

Yeah. And you've written a few different books. In fact, you have one getting ready to come out right now. So you have two books already published, and then this is your third one, correct? yes that's right okay and talk to me a little bit about this book because it kind of really does tie into your background but then also the the topic

Yes. So the book is called The Story Cycle. It is getting ready to go on presale as of this conversation right now and will come out officially on October 11th of 2022. So depending on when you're listening to this episode, it may already be out. Definitely gonna be available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and all the fun places you can buy your book. But yeah, I mean, like you said, Tom, it is kind of a summary of all the things that I learned about storytelling uh throughout the years of kind of getting to do that for a bunch of different organizations in different ways so i wanted to be able to share and put together the things that i had learned i certainly don't know everything and there's still quite a few other storytelling books out there but i wanted to bring something hopefully new to the conversation and one of the things that having read many of the storytelling the business storytelling books that are out there a lot of them have great principles and say a lot of great things. And I've kind of mimic and echoed several of those principles in the story cycle. But one of the things that I noticed that many of them did not have was actual examples of stories. And so that was one of the things I really intentionally wanted to focus on. And it took me quite a while to research and find those right stories of great organizations and nonprofits and churches and businesses telling, you know, like exemplifying and living out the story principles that we hear about. But I really wanted to connect kind of like a real world practical story to each and everything that I talked about in the book. So hopefully that's something that people find intriguing and makes it a enjoyable and worthwhile read and something that will stick with people once they've read it.

Yeah, I mean, well, you had given me kind of an advanced copy of a chapter and you asked me just to look over it. This was many months ago. You did this with a handful of people. And I will say this, the chapter that you gave me, I was just fixated. I like to read, but it is often hard for me to read. It does take time. I'm a slower reader. But I breezed by your chapter and it was fascinating because you had those real-world examples. As a reader, I love seeing the real-world examples and see how it actually plays out. Not just the theory or the idea, but just see how it plays out within a real-world example. I think it was fantastic. I can't wait to get it. I would love to read it.

Yeah, well, I appreciate that. And it was so helpful because like you said, I did, I shared out bits and pieces of the book as I was piecing it together with so many of my trusted friends and people who I know are very experienced in this field as well. And so it was great to get that kind of feedback and make the book even stronger. But yeah, I appreciate those kind of words, Tom.

Well, what do you hope that people get out of this? Is there like one or two hopes that you have?

That's, I mean, yeah, there's so many different pieces that I've poured into it. I mean, I think overall, the idea behind the cycle, the story cycle itself is that when we become better organizations, we're able to tell better stories. And if we're able to focus on storytelling in the way that we're providing value to people, like we're serving people, like... That's how we create great stories. And so if we're able to do that, then that makes our organization better too. So that's kind of part of the idea behind the cycle. And there's a lot more to it than just that, but really that great organizations tell great stories and better stories can help create better organizations. So that's kind of the underlying, the kind of deep underlying principle there is that we can, yeah, we can hopefully learn from the stories that we're hearing from the people that we serve.

That's awesome. Well, again, we'll have the link for it for you to pre-order or depending on when you're listening to this, you could be ordering it as well. Will it have a, will you have a Kindle edition of it?

Yes. Yeah. We're doing a paperback, hardback, Kindle. And then my goal is to, once I, I kind of get my feet under me and have some time is to hopefully record an audio book as well. So all the different versions so that people can, can get it as you know, whatever way that they prefer.

That's awesome. I love Kindle. I'm a Kindle guy. I know different people like different styles, but I like to have all my books in one place so I can just keep on going back and forth to them. All right. So let me ask you this, you know, as we're talking about books. Why did you choose to write books? Again, this is your third. And again, you were a freelance writer. You love to write. Why not just write blogs and articles? Why did you choose to write a book? And let's go back to your very first one, the original storyteller, right?

So I think the short, simple answer to that question is because I can physically hold it in my hands because there's something so satisfying, even with a Kindle book, right? You know, if you've got it downloaded on your device, you can see it there, you can flip through it. There's just something so satisfying about actually being able to see kind of a big project like that come together, obviously compared to shorter form blog posts and articles, which are great. you know, a big multi-page book just feels a lot more, there's a lot more effort and energy that goes into it. So you really just have to, you focus, you have to kind of be in it for the long haul. You have to kind of really love this idea and put so much behind it. So there's just, again, there's something that comes out of being able to kind of finally put that together and send it out. I mean, it also opens up, frankly, opportunities to be able to come on podcasts like this one and do speaking opportunities and, you know, a blog is a lot more accomplishable, which is a good thing, but people pay attention. when you're able to put a book together so it just grabs people's attention a lot more readily and it feels like a lot more of an accomplishment so i will also say i think you should ultimately do both i think one of the reasons why i was able to write a couple books and be able to have the kind of stamina and skill to allow me to kind of put excuse me, put together a more long form piece of content was because I write shorter form pieces of content. I write blogs regularly. And so that number one builds up again, the skill and the stamina to be able to do that. But then second of all, there are some people who blog on a regular basis so that they can then turn it into a book.

Yeah.

So sometimes it gives you the content and the ideas and helps you work through all those different pieces so that you can eventually patch everything together into a much more long form piece of content. So ultimately you should be doing both. If you want to eventually write a book, don't just start by trying to write a book. You wouldn't start by trying to run a marathon right away. You'd run a couple mile races first or a 5K and a 10K. You'd work yourself up to that. And so in the same way, I've been able to work up my stamina by writing a bunch of shorter pieces and then knowing, okay, this is what it's going to take to be able to put together a book. But ultimately, you know, why do people run marathons? It's the same kind of question, right? It's because it feels like it's achievement. It feels like it's something that not everybody is doing. And it's still very achievable. Again, if you're able to run and build up that skill over time, you're able to run a marathon or you're able to write a book. But it takes that dedication and that effort to be able to finally hold that final copy in your hands.

Yeah, that's awesome. How long would you say that it would take you to write a book from conception to actually you've got the final product in hand?

yeah it's a great question and it varies so much um my first book the original storyteller um i had wanted to kind of write a book and i had this idea and i just decided i'm gonna do it and so i wrote the first draft in about a month and it took me another six months to really revise it and polish it and get it together so i mean it was about a year from conception to publication. That was much simpler because I was doing self-publication versus what I've done with a publisher for this book. And we can obviously get into kind of the differences there. For the story cycle, I had that idea probably even before I wrote the original storyteller. It was kind of an idea for how to tell stories as an organization and what it takes to be able to communicate with your audience. So I had that idea years and years ago. and had kind of noodled on it and built it up and pieced all these things together. And so when I wanted to write this next book, I was like, okay, well, let me unveil this idea that I've been kicking around in my head for five or six years. From the time it took me to actually start writing to being able to present it to the publisher was probably about five or six months. And then the process of actually, I kind of share the first manuscript with them at the beginning of 2022. And of course, now it's coming out in October of 2022. So it's taken about nine to 10 months of their process of editing and preparing the manuscript of design and all those kind of things. So when you go with a publisher, it adds a lot more time in there, but you're getting a lot more. out of that process especially a lot more professionalism than than just me trying to do it all on my own so it really varies what that timeline looks like what type of book what type of writer you are and all that kind of stuff but typically about a year or two is is a decent ballpark of what to expect

And this is great because, again, your first two books were self-published, but now you have now you are publishing with a publishing company. What what do you think are some of the reasons why I know? Like, listen, I love to write just like you and I do blogs and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And I've teetered with. writing books myself. And I actually wrote a small little ebook and kind of like a lot of how you highlighted a minute or two ago about how I took a bunch of different blogs and I combined them together, edited it, obviously, to make a longer form content. But I'm still probably like 20 pages of total content. But why do you think people maybe don't write? Like if they have the idea in their head, what prevents them? Like what are some stumbling blocks maybe that prevent them from writing?

I think, I mean, time is certainly a big one. It takes time to write anything, but especially to sit down and to put together 30,000 words, 40,000 words, 50,000 words, you know, 50, 60, 100 pages, whatever that book you want to come together. Like that takes a lot of effort. And so. People stay busy. People have a lot of different distractions and a lot of different things in their life. So if you want to write a book, you really just have to carve out the time and be able to build yourself margin to do it a little bit at a time. I mean, it's daunting to feel like I need to go in a cabin in the woods for a month and just crank this thing out. that's not something that all of us are able to do. And so like it really, most of my books have just come like, okay, I'm going to take an hour every evening this week and just work on this next chapter. And then the week after that, okay, I'm just going to, I've got 30 minutes in the morning where I'm just going to carve out and do that. So finding the time to do it is a huge barrier. I think a lot of it's also psychological. Like it feels very daunting to climb this mountain of gosh, I can't even write this blog post, so how am I going to write an entire book? And it starts with those small steps, like we talked about before, just being able to do the small pieces first and then work up to the book. And know that your first book doesn't have to be... a traditional publisher that's going to send you a big you know prepayment and all that you know it's going to sell 100 000 copies like no just put out an ebook and sell 10 copies to your friends and then okay next put together a slightly longer book and release that on amazon and sell 50 copies like if you lower the expectations a little bit for yourself and just go my goal is not to reach a certain page count or sell it how many copies or make any money off of this because really if you're trying to make money off of a book that's going to take you like that's a fool's errand i feel like in a lot of ways like it's really hard to make good money off of a book um so don't don't have that be your your goal or your expectation that can be gravy on top of it like that can be a nice thing to have if you do that but let your goal just to be i'm just going to write this book and i'm going to put it out there and that's going to kind of break that that barrier of i can't do this and it's going to tell you no no you can't you can do this i think that's one of the things that helped me initially was just working up the courage for myself to say like i can write a book i can put it out there and now i feel just so much freer to be like to to say oh no i can come up with another book now and i have a list of several other books that i have ideas for that i want to write And I feel like it's completely doable because I've done this before. I've run this race before. And so that's one of the first things is just getting the first one out there of overcoming that mental hurdle. And once you do that, it just becomes a lot easier. And hopefully hearing, again, examples like mine, there are plenty of people out there who didn't think they could do it, who don't feel confident in their writing skills or don't feel like their idea was strong enough. And you just have to kind of be able to go and do it. And I will say that is one of the other things too is, that idea that core central idea for the book like that does have to be really strong and sometimes it takes time to figure out what that like what you want to write the book about um because frankly you're going to have to spend a year or two fleshing out that idea and reading that copy over and over and over again until you're just i mean you're sick of it i i probably won't be able to read my book for another year or two just because i've read it 50 times by this point. And I just, I'm blind to whether it's good or not. I just have to get it out into the world and have other people tell me what they think of it because you just have to spend so much time with your own idea that it has to be really one that's strong, but then also one you love and you're willing to dedicate that much time to.

Yeah, this is great. I mean, I'm hearing a few different things. One of them is just discipline. You need to create that discipline, which I've never really been able to do. I have the idea in my head and it's just like, like you just said, an hour a day, I'm going to do for this period of time or 30 minutes in the morning, whatever it is, you, you've set up disciplines in your life, but then also you didn't let potential roadblocks like. the imposter syndrome, I think. I often feel like, oh, I'm no Stephen King. I'm no Beth Moore. I can't write these books. They're all so gifted and talented in their writing style. I can't do this. But the reality is you didn't let that stop you. You didn't have an agent your first book that you published. You self-published that book. And now in today's world, it is so easy to self-publish. Like you just highlighted that you can put your book for free or for a small fee on Amazon and you can get that out there. So let's talk about self-publishing here a little bit. Like what's the process a little bit about self-publishing? What are some things that people have to consider about self-publishing? Because that is really that great first step that people can take to where they could maybe get an agent or get a publishing house, publish a future book.

yeah first of all i want to point out how awesome it was that you the two examples of authors you came up with were stephen king and beth moore which love both of them both fantastic authors both a little bit different they're so different they're very different but and and i don't know if either of them ever ever had to self-publish but they're i mean they're kind of the exceptions to the rule they are the ones who have achieved this great fame and you want to always compare yourself to them but you don't need to like just like we said get the book out there and self-publishing is one of the best ways to just get started and it makes it a lot easier to then if you want to keep growing and if you want to go with a traditional publisher or get an agent or any of those kind of things you can say hey i've got this many self-published books under my belt i know what i'm doing that makes you a lot more attractive and it makes a lot more achievable to get there so yeah i think self-publishing is a great first step i've heard other authors on podcasts and the like talk about like no like that's that's what you should start with don't try to get an agent at first unless you're in some unique circumstance like do self-publishing so you can work out the kinks and then your second or third or fourth book is that much better as a result of it so yeah i mean you can go amazon has made this a lot more achievable um they have kindle direct publishing which is their self-publishing kind of arm it used to be called create space it was a company that amazon acquired but i didn't like that was that was like opening the the door is a possibility to me when i learned about that when i was working on my first book because i just thought okay i'm going to create a pdf out of this and just email it to my friends and when somebody told me that no you can put this on amazon pretty easily all you have to do is send them the pdf and they will actually print on demand for you and you're not actually having to pay anything up front you're just putting in the work and then they they use the costs of the book they just they give you a small royalty and their printing fees and their royalty is all that kind of stuff is baked into the cost of what the you know the end user is paying so yeah you're not again you're not getting much money off of that but you're getting the pride to say hey i put it out there it's on amazon i can send you a link it feels just so much more official and real and opens you up a whole world of possibilities granted you're competing with a lot of other people who are self-publishing amazon is a very crowded space yeah because of that possibility but you know it's there for you if you want to be able to go and do it it's right there and self-publishing again makes it so that the biggest obstacle is is yourself the biggest hurdle is just getting over your own mental block and that imposter syndrome which you mentioned which is is so devastating and again i i still face that again i've I've published a few books now and I'm like, well, but this isn't a real book. I have so many self-doubts that I still wrestle with. So that never quite goes away, but you get better at being able to silence those self-doubts and quiet those things. And it becomes, again, it just gives you a tool to be able to overcome that and feel like you've actually achieved something really, really great, which you have if you've been able to publish a book.

What is something that you've learned about writing or about writing books through self-publishing? Was there like an aha moment that you had like, oh, I didn't realize this, but now I know. And so it made your second book even better than your first book. I think...

Probably the biggest, I've had several realizations. One of the biggest ones is that writing the book is, that's only the beginning. That it doesn't take as long as you would think to write the book. the harder part i think one of the toughest parts is editing the book um that usually takes like five to six times longer because the first draft the original manuscript of your book can be random ideas and crazy all over the place it shouldn't be perfect it's never going to be perfect the the goal is to just get it out of your system to put it down on paper and to just like crank out a hundred pages of something and then the tough part is going back and starting over and going okay how can i make this 5 10 15 better into something that people want to read i mean the first manuscript of the first book that i came out with the original storyteller was was wildly different from the version people can order on Amazon right now. And frankly, it was a lot worse. And I sent it out to a few friends and was like, hey, what do you think about this? And several of them just said, this isn't good. This is not something people would read, but... the idea is good enough and you can be good enough to make this worth somebody's time. And I had to go back and revise it like six or seven times and work on it and really just like hammer away at the pieces that were bad and refine them into something that was better. and so once i went through that process one time it was like it's agonizing to go back and read the things that you wrote that weren't really good you're like okay there's something there's something in here that's good how do i like whittle that down and then build it back up again into something good yeah and I had to do that about a dozen times on the story cycle it's just okay I put together this original manuscript and it's okay it's probably better than the first manuscript of the first book I wrote but it's still not something that I I would be proud to share so let me go back and revise it and edit it again and again and again until it really is something that's worthwhile and i think again that process becomes easier the more times you do it but that's probably the most grueling thing and then on the other half of it i you know i'm getting ready to release the book but this is like just the first half because now i have to go and sell the book i have to market it and promote it and and again just publishing in itself is is a big you know ordeal but i'm no longer satisfied with just that i want to sell know as many copies as possible and i want to showcase it to people and use it as a resource and maybe make a little bit of money on the side and maybe help finance the next book project that i want to work on so like my expectations get a little bit higher but i still have to keep working at it and have to keep promoting it and have to keep like there's all those different pieces that people don't realize when they're starting out that like oh i just need to write this thing and then the rest will take care of itself and it's like

no it's it's very achievable to write it and you can do that but there's all this other stuff that's involved around editing and distributing and promoting a book that's daunting but doable yeah what what um what kept you going i'm sure there were times in every one of your books that you just like i screw it i'm not doing this anymore what kept you going

That's a great question. And I think it was probably something different because I certainly had those moments. I certainly had a few times where I was like, is anybody going to want to read this? Again, it's that voice of doubt, that self, that imposter syndrome that pops back up many times throughout the book process. And I mean, part of it, at least through this book, was I can do this. I know I can do this. I know that I know what I'm talking about. Like, I was just kind of having to go back and reset and give a little bit of self-assurance. So that helps. And that's easier said than done. But I think even just the fact that I had. finished the book before and i held it in my hands and i like felt how awesome that was that i had achieved this thing and so that was a big piece of it too was just knowing what the end result felt like um and i think you you begin to like just like with running um i don't love running but i love having finished like a race so it's the same thing like the process of writing can be grueling and daunting and punishing but it's like but i know how great it feels after i'm done and i love the feeling of like seeing the finished work either online or in print or whatever so like knowing that that finish line is out there somewhere is probably the thing that again helps you psychologically keep going and get over those hurdles that definitely pop up along the way

Yeah, I don't know if you, I don't golf much, but I do know when I go golfing, it's not like one of those best experiences, but when you hit that perfect shot or when you hit that shot, you're like, man, they're just that satisfaction that you get from doing that. Robert, this has been great. As we kind of wrap up here, what is one last piece of encouragement you would give to someone who's thinking about writing a book right now?

I mean, I'd fall back on what we've talked about this whole time that you can do it. Like all you have to do is dedicate yourself to it, but that there's somebody out there who wants to read what you have to say and can learn from your experiences. And if you feel passionate about it enough, like it can become achievable. Like there's no... There's no huge gatekeepers anymore that are going to prevent you and say no. And you may get some rejections along the way or feel rejected along the way, but that's okay and that's normal. And everybody faces those imposter syndromes, especially when you're trying to do something big. the bigger and more audacious your goal is, the more it's going to feel like that pressure and that weight and that doubt. But you can take that maybe as a sign of encouragement that like, okay, I'm feeling a lot of resistance on this. So maybe that means I just got to keep pushing through. And then when I get to the other side, it's going to be all the better and all the more worth it. And I'm going to be that much stronger for having done it. So it's really crummy and hard when you're in the middle of that. And when you're trying to push through, but if you have a strong enough reason and strong enough passion and drive to actually complete this thing, because not every book needs to be written. Like I have a ton of ideas for like, that could be a potential book, but I'm like, I don't, that idea is not strong enough and I don't care about it enough to want to try to go through that. But if you get that idea and you're like, yeah, I feel called to this. I got to write this book. It's burning inside me because I've felt that feeling too. That can be the thing that motivates you. That can be the engine that keeps moving you forward. And the more resistance you meet, hopefully the stronger the end result is going to be.

That's awesome. Yeah, I think that's a great encouragement. And actually, I'm encouraged as I've got different little thoughts in my head and things I've written down over the years. I'm like, maybe I need to brush that off and just start like what Robert said, carve out an hour a day for the next week, see where I go and just start making some goals and see how that happens. So. yeah this has been very encouraging uh robert i wish you the best of luck with your book and we're going to promote it here so you'll share with me a link of how we can do that and it'll be in the show notes um i would strongly encourage you just from the section that i read it's going to be a good book and so you need to you need to get it um whether you're a church communicator or whether you're in a business uh this would be something that would be fantastic for you to get robert how can people connect with you share with me your website and also your socials

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I will say, so storycyclebook.com is where people can find all the stuff about the book specifically. And as it comes out, I'll share links to Amazon and Barnes & Noble, all the places people can find it. If you want to connect with me specifically on social media, it's jamrobcar. on Twitter and LinkedIn are the places where I'm most active. I have accounts on all the socials, but those are the ones that you can actually reach out and connect with me. And having written, again, a couple of books to this point and sharing that with people, it's opened up so many great conversations. I mean, very similar to this one of people going. yeah, I kind of feel like I could do that now. And maybe it's just like, oh, yeah, if you can write a book, maybe I can write a book too. And that's awesome. That's fantastic if I can encourage people in that way. But so if you feel the same way, you have a question about self-publishing, I don't know everything, but I know what I've learned. And so you can absolutely feel free to DM me on social media, and I will do my best to get back with you with a helpful answer. And yeah, that's how you can reach out to me.

yeah and i just appreciate that you're very active on twitter and so uh even with some of your controversial statements that you like to make that that you and i don't always agree on but it's good yeah yeah well robert as always it's a pleasure talking with you and so uh thank you and best of luck on your book thanks so much tom i appreciate you having me on this conversation Okay, so I want to get one picture of you and I on here so I can tweet it out. So I'm going to take a screenshot.

Do you want me to hold the book up? Oh, yeah, that'd be great. That'd be even better.

Yeah. Okay, ready? One, two, three. Great. I'm going to tweet this out. Tell me, I didn't write it down, but tell me the website again.

Storycyclebook.com. I can also drop in the chat too.

I got it. It's good. Okay, cool. Yeah, I appreciate it, man. This is great. So again, I appreciate you taking time out of your day to do it.

No, I appreciate you having me on. It's always fun to catch up and talk sports and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah. Well, this will definitely go out next Thursday. Of course, I'll tag you in it and all that kind of stuff.

So absolutely. Well, yeah, I'll, I'll do everything that I can to share it and I'll put it on the website and all that stuff. Again, I'm trying to be on all the podcasts that I can be to help promote the book. If you, if you know somebody else who's looking for a guest, let me know. Cause I'm trying to try to do the virtual book tour.

Yeah, no, no. I think that's great. So I will definitely, I will definitely connect you if I, if I know that. So yeah.

Sounds great, Tom.

All right, dude. I'll talk to you soon.

Cool, man. Good talking to you. Bye.

All right, so what did you think? What stood out to you from that conversation I just had with Robert? How were you encouraged? Are you thinking about writing a book and it's in an idea and you're kind of just been slow on processing it through? What were you encouraged by today? I know, as I said in the interview, I was encouraged and I'm going to dust off some ideas and some notes that I had and see what I can do and put those on paper and book form. but how were you encouraged? Definitely share it in the comments section or definitely hit me up on Twitter at TAPounder. Hit tag Robert as well. His social links are in the show notes. So I want to encourage you to tag us both and share what you were encouraged with. And I also do want to encourage you, get Robert's book. You can get the link on it in the show notes. order it pre-order wherever you're at just get the book and see it can help you in your life but also in your ministry because again as church communicators as online ministers we are telling a story how can you be more effective in that robert's book is going to help you do that today All right, heroes, thanks so much for joining me for another episode of the Church Digital Sidekick podcast. If you enjoyed this, definitely go and subscribe to it. It's on YouTube. It's on Apple, iTunes. It's on Spotify. It's at the Digital Bootcamp Facebook group. It's on the Church Digital. Definitely go there and subscribe to it. We'd love for you to connect in that way to get these episodes every time they come out. All right, heroes, well, I hope you have a great rest of your day, a great rest of your week. And until next time, have a great one.