 And when it comes to self publishing a book, what's involved in that? Tell us a little bit about how did you do it and how are you getting the word out? So the first thing is you got to write the book and writing the book is a really, really difficult thing. In my particular case, I started about seven and a half years ago. I wrote six chapters. I looked at them and one day I said, you know what, this is all garbage and I threw them all out. And then I started over a few months later and I wrote another three chapters and I looked at them and I said more garbage and I threw them all out. And then a few months, you know, more went by and I finally wrote one chapter and I looked at it and I said, this is good. Nice. And I just let it sit for about 10 months. And then I picked it up again and I read it and I was like, this is still good. And in the next year, I wrote another 11 chapters. So I had my initial manuscript and I thought, yay, I've got a good book. So then I gave it to a friend of mine who was in my field to do a technical read. And unfortunately, after he read that, I had to rewrite four chapters from scratch because he basically said they didn't make any sense. So it took me months to rewrite those four chapters. Rewriting is way more difficult than writing. And then I thought I had a good manuscript. I gave it back to him and he was cool with them. And I gave him to another friend of mine who has written a couple of books. Because of that, I had to rewrite two other chapters. Then I gave him to my sister-in-law, who is the editor of a literary magazine. And she did the first sort of readability edit on it. And I thought it was good. At this point, I had been through so many editing rounds. And then I showed it to some people and they said, it really needs a good edit. So I did this one myself. In last December, I edited it down from 84,000 words to 63,000 words. I took out over 20% of the book. It was a very painful process. Yeah, I can imagine. It was so much better when I finished. I took out a lot of redundancies. I tightened up the language. And then I still gave it to a few more people to edit. So finally, in May, I had a complete manuscript. So your first task as someone who writes a book is to get to the point where you have a manuscript that you're actually not embarrassed by. If you want to do this all by yourself. It's a good idea to hire publishers, sorry, to hire editors. In my case, I had enough people in my network that people did it as a favor to me, which was lovely. And then you actually have to take a manuscript and turn it into an actual book. So you need to find someone to design the covers and the layout. And that's more involved than I imagined. But my designer was amazing. She did a great job. Then you got to figure out how to actually put it on a publishing platform. Probably the biggest, most popular public publishing platform right now is KDP by Amazon. I think it's Kindle Direct Publishing. That's what it stands for. Basically, they tell you how to create templates that your book fits into. And you create those templates. You upload it to their site. And you got a book. Wow. Just like that. Just like that. I mean, it's a little more involved. In order to have a book, you have to have an ISBN number. There's different ways of getting that. You can have Amazon do it for you. You can do it yourself. There's advantages to either. There's also, if you want to get your book out through independent bookstores, then you shouldn't use Amazon exclusively. I used an organization called Ingram Sparks, which is a platform for publishing or self-publishing that the independent bookstores use. And you can do both. So I did both simultaneously. Total learning curve. I had to get a Library of Congress number. Who even knew I needed that? But you, yeah. But that's why Amali, who assisted me a lot in this, she helped me figure out a lot of that stuff. Because the research would have just taken me so much time to figure out all those things. And that's because, again, I'm independent. I want to do things myself. There's people out there you can pay to just shepherd you through that whole process. And I think for many people, that's the smarter choice. It wasn't the choice for me just because I like doing things myself. That's awesome. And now, in terms of just getting it out there, because I'm sure there's people listening who have always wanted to write a book. And the one thing I always try to figure out is like, what's the second step? How do you get it out? Is it social media? Even my brain just goes, oh, it must be social media. But obviously, now it could be readings that different. You can't do that, I guess, because of COVID. So what I did decided to do is start local. Start with everybody I know in the world. Now, in my case, that happens to be a lot of people. I've taught in dozens of companies. I've taught thousands of people over the years. I've reached out to all of my students. I've reached out to all of my clients. I've reached out to all my friends and family members, letting them know about the book, asking them to spread the word, asking them to read it and comment on it. And it's a slow process, but it feels like it's gathering some steam. I think social media is huge. I started off with LinkedIn as the main platform that I'm pushing it on, partly because it's the one that I'm most comfortable with, most familiar with, and partly because it's a trade book. So aiming for a business audience is not a bad thing for me. But I also think that I shouldn't limit myself to that. So my next adventure is to figure out how to make better use of Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. The idea is not to do it all myself, to sort of start some sparks going and hopefully have people share it and promote it from there, because that's how things go viral. And that's what I want. So I like it. I like the honesty of that. Hey, everyone. Thanks for checking out that clip. If you enjoyed it, be sure to hit the like button down below. And if you're interested in hearing the full episode, it's out right now on our YouTube channel. We've had a lot of great guests come on this show before, and we've got a lot of great guests coming up in the future. So hit subscribe so that you don't miss a single episode. On one final note, we're always looking for new ideas and new companies feature on the show. So if you know of someone or know of a company, write us a comment down below letting us know who they are and what they do. We'd be happy to have them on the show. Until then, I'll just be here waiting for your comments. So, see you later.