 Welcome to Dare to Dream. This show is sponsored by Dr. Dane Here and Access Consciousness. Find out more about their amazing energy work out into the world at Dr. Dane Here, H-E-E-R.com, as well as accessconsciousness.com. Today's guest is Bill Gladstone, who founded Waterside Productions in 1982 and has placed more than 5,000 book titles with dozens of publishers. Currently, Mr. Gladstone represents authors such as spiritual teachers Eckhart Toll, Dr. Barbara DeAngelis, and Neil Donald Walsh, international peace advocate Dr. Irvin Laszlo, the Napoleon Hill Foundation, New York Times bestselling authors Gay Hendricks and John Asseraf, plus musician Neil Young. Mr. Gladstone is also the author of his own bestselling novels, plus a book co-authored with Jack Canfield. His company, Waterside Productions, is one of the most successful literary agencies in the world, generating more than $500 million in author royalties for their clients. They specialize in nonfiction and have a robust foreign rights division with placement of titles in more than 40 languages. As a literary agency, they are focused on established authors with significant pre-existing audiences and track records of success. And today, those who are listening and watching the show, Bill Gladstone is offering you a special. He is offering his book writing course, and you could get it as a listener or watcher only. Go to bit.ly slash Bill Glad. That's bit.ly slash Bill Glad and get your book writing course right now. And of course, for me, Debbie Daschinger, it is my joy because I'm a book writing coach and I also run guaranteed international bestsellers for my authors. So for you to have an outlet today to understand better what publishers and agents are looking for, I'm excited for you to enjoy this show today with Bill Gladstone. Welcome. The Dare to Dream podcast has been nominated for two People's Choice podcast awards, as well as a Webby Award. And Dare to Dream is ranked in the top 100 best podcasts in all of USA in all of self-improvement, as well as trending this week in Portugal, as well as in Vietnam. So we're so grateful to those countries for tuning in and listening. And Debbie Daschinger is a certified coach whose expertise is visibility in media. I coach people how to write a page, turn a book, and I've got a company that takes you, authors, to a guaranteed international bestseller on Amazon. And as well, I teach the ultimate visibility formula and I show you how to get interviewed on radio and podcasts and get massive results, a good ROI for being interviewed. If you would like some free tips and tools and videos on how you can be interviewed and even how to figure out what your message is and where you can get booked and what to do, what your next right steps are, go to Debbie Daschinger.com slash message. That's D-E-B-B-I-D-A-C-H-I-N-G-E-R.com slash message. So Bill, welcome to Dare to Dream. It's really great to have you. Well, it's a pleasure to be here. It's a beautiful day here in California. And I'm looking forward to your questions and I'm looking forward to helping as many of your listeners as I can in whatever way best serves them. Yeah, because I think we've probably got a really nice amalgam here of people, mostly very spiritual people listening, who some of them want to write a book and have not yet forade into that arena. And then there are those who have written and are looking at you and saying, okay, this is good, this is a good goal. Next step, next up leveling. So you have the oldest and largest among the oldest and largest literary agencies on the West Coast. And you've represented a lot of great bestselling authors to publishers in over 20 countries generated millions of dollars for clients. This is the kind of track record we wanna see. What title for folks who are wondering, what kind of titles, what kind of genres are you into or do you look for that you'd like to represent? Well, I'm eclectic. I like everything. What's most interesting to me is what's new and something, an idea or a concept or an author platform that I haven't experienced before. So for example, just today, someone connected with us, he happens to be blind and he's overcome his challenges. He's actually very well known. And I was intrigued by him because it's something new for me and it's someone who's looking at being blind, not as a handicap, but as just a special situation that has as many pluses as it does minuses. And he wants to share that way of looking at his quote, disability, because he thinks that the way that he's dealing with his blindness can be a model for other people dealing with other types of handicaps. So that got my attention, even though I'm not gonna be able to get him like he has a track record with other books. And unfortunately, none of them sold more than 5,000 copies. So right off the bat, I told him, you know, we're not gonna be able to deal with a big New York house. He said, that's fine. That's not what I'm doing it for. And I do a lot of speaking and this, that and the other. So for him actually, our own water side publishing is what we're gonna do together. And you know, that's not something that, you know, a normal agent, a normal agent would be said, oh, you know, it's just not something I can make any money doing. And I'm sorry, you know, not for us. But you know, we're looking at it differently. Now on the other side, of course, you know, yes, I do get excited when someone who has a huge platform comes to me or someone, you know, we did a book recently with Neil Young and, you know, that's pretty cool. You know, we like his music and you know, it wasn't his autobiography, which would have gotten a lot of money, but it, you know, him being him was a book about his venture into the music business to create Pono, which was a new way to deliver downloadable music at a much higher quality level than available currently. And he actually failed because the music industry didn't want this to happen. They didn't want high fidelity to be so inexpensive because from a business model that they have, that wasn't something they wanted to promote, even though Neil had, you know, Madonna and Bob Dylan and, you know, just about everybody who's anybody supporting what he wanted to do. So that was, that's just another example. Of the books that we've represented that have sold a lot, in many cases, the authors were not that well known at the time we represented them. Eckhart Toll was just starting. Marie Kondo was very well known in Japan, but not at all outside of Japan. So we are willing to take more chances. That said, the bar keeps getting raised higher and higher by the New York publishers. And unless someone already has a very large following, and I'm talking, you know, Gabby Bernstein level following, Marianne Williams level following, it's going to be very hard to get a major. What does that mean exactly? Is that, does that mean one million? It means more than one million, more than one million. And more importantly, because even one million now, I've gotten turned down for new authors with one million followers because publishers have said, well, one million is nice, but how many of these people have ever purchased a product? That's huge. That's right. And so they'd rather have a hundred thousand that have purchased a product than a million and nobody's purchased a product because they're getting very sophisticated and it's become a money business. I mean, it's always to some extent, but you always had some small eccentric publishers who were interested in more than just the money. And you still have publishers and editors, particularly some of the independent companies that are interested in more than just the money. But in the end, the people running the big companies could be running at any big company and the only way that they're judging things is does it make money? And if it makes money, they do it. Occasionally, very rarely, we'll see an exception to that. I remember 40 years ago when I was senior editor for Hardcore, Grace Yovanovich, I was told once every six months, I can do a book just because I wanna do a book even if the P&L projection is not positive. I was senior editor and I had fair amount of leverage and that was a big gift, if you will, from the publisher to allow me to do that. Today, only the really top editors get the opportunity to do a book that doesn't pencil out. So for most of the people listening, I hate to say it, but unless you've already had a successful book because just having a book, if the book sold 5,000 copies or less, you're kind of dead in the water and you should look at alternatives. That's really part of the reason why we developed our own publishing. Ours is hybrid where the author still has to cover the upfront costs, but working with our network, those costs are kept way down much less than if you self-published. And with our model, you still as the author get 70% because we are relying on you to do the bulk of the marketing also. And this is where it really gets tricky. We will do a book if the author has a really strong marketing plan. We do not want authors to lose money. If an author has written a good book but has no way to market it and is expecting us as the publisher to be the only or 90% of the marketing, it's not a good fit because in the end, they're gonna lose money, we're gonna lose time, which is the same as money for us. I have to pay everyone. So unless we can sell at least 500 copies, we're not gonna do it. And that may seem, well, that's trivial selling 500 copies. Well, the average self-published book sells fewer than 100 copies. So 500 is really not terrible. Of course we want books that are gonna sell at least three to 4,000 to make any money. 500 is kind of, okay, we covered our, because if a book, I mean, it barely covers our expenses, but that's okay. And I'm always getting complaints from my team because if I like somebody, I often waive the fee or reduce the fee, but then that hurts them because at the end of the year, they won't get this big a bonus because we didn't make any money. So they don't want me to do that too much, but I do anyway. So, you know, I don't know what to tell people except try, try, try. And there's many reasons to write books that have nothing to do with the financial return on your investment. The first reason is just in the act of writing the book, you're gonna learn so much about yourself and your subject. There's, you know, they used to say, the best way to learn something is teach it. Then you find out what you know and what you don't. So there's that value right off the bat. The second is I've actually had books that have sold only a few hundred copies that have had significant impact on those people that did purchase or read the book. And you can never predict that's why the world is such a wonderful miracle place. Of course, you know, when we do something in a million or in our case, we've had 10 million people read a single book. You know, you're having a big impact and it feels great. But sometimes you don't know, but you may be having just as big an impact because even if only a few hundred people have read your book, if one of those people connects with an organization and implements the ideas or is moved by the ideas in your book, you have no way of predicting what the multiplier effect might be. You might actually be moving the needle for tens, hundreds of millions of people, even though not that many people have read your book. So you need to keep this perspective because it's not just a way of sort of rationalizing and justifying all this time that you've spent when you haven't even gotten your money back, but it's real. It's the way the universe actually works. It's why they talk about the butterfly effect. It's like some small movement of a butterfly can affect weather patterns and create hurricanes and storms. At least that's what I've been told. Whether that's specifically true or more metaphorically true, it is true. Nothing that we do happens in a vacuum. Everything that happens, including thoughts and there's more research going on to this. That's why meditation is so important. Just your thought patterns actually have an impact on your environment. So everything you do has an impact and writing books, one of the most valuable exercises you can do whether you sell any copies or not. So I'm all for people writing, whether they have a platform or not. If you want to do it professionally and you have the resources, I do recommend whether it's with Waterside or someone else, work with professionals because if you look at the amount of time that you're going to spend writing it, it's certainly worth spending some extra time to be sure the book is properly edited, the property laid out, designed, that you have a nice cover. The end, if you do all that work, then it's definitely worth spending some more time and money to be sure that you promote and market the book because if you don't promote and market your book, it's very unlikely the book will sell. There's always been exceptions. Our own Eckhart told is the biggest exception. Eckhart, particularly in the beginning, would do nothing, absolutely nothing to promote his books. That wasn't the way he was wired. And but the universe wanted Eckhart's message out there and other people who loved to market, such as Oprah found the book and did all the marketing for him. But it was very, very interesting before Oprah jumped on the bandwagon with her big webinar. We had actually chosen a publisher because it was the only big New York publisher at the time willing to sign Eckhart without Eckhart agreeing to do any promotion of any kind, which is very unusual. Of course, they assumed he would do something. He just wasn't going to obligate himself. But that didn't turn out to be the case. He literally, I mean, when the book was first published, they had organized, well, people, this was kind of understand this 20 years ago, but People Magazine wanted to do a live chat interview, 30 minutes. And Eckhart said, no, that's not something I want to do. And he did nothing. The book still sold fairly well because it was his second book, but it wasn't until, you know, we kept pressing and the poor publisher said, is there anything Eckhart will do? And I asked Eckhart, he says, well, you know, I was watching television the other day and I saw that Oprah show. I would do something with Oprah. So then we arranged for him to do a radio interview. Oprah had a radio show. Oprah fell in love with Eckhart and boom, everything, you know, took off. But so it's strange what leads to success. Another odd circumstance was when we did the Marie Kondo book, the book was selling okay, nothing fabulous. And then Signori Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis found out about the book. And I don't know whether it was Instagram or Tweets or whatever they were using, but they mentioned that they were gonna, one of them was going to put the Does It Spark Joy model as a tattoo on her back with her other tattoos. When that hit the internet, the tattoo community went wild. Everybody in the tattoo community, of which I didn't know there are tens, if not more millions. And the book went from selling 500 a week to 50,000 a week. So, you know, obviously there's a lot of other things, but that was sort of the final breakthrough moment. So I encourage everybody to do whatever you can to promote your book. My good friend Jack Canfield talks about the rule of five. When he and Mark Victor Hanson did their first chicken soup book, they both agreed that every day they would do five different things to promote their book. Most of the things they did failed. The one thing way back in the day, this is when Touched by an Angel was a hot TV show. They sent a copy, I don't know to which actor, I think it was Delarise. Anyway, she got a copy of the book. She loved it. She raved about the book. She contacted them. They sent copies to everybody on the cast. And that was really one of the most valuable things that they had done that led to success. But, you know, none of these are opportunities that you can duplicate. None of these were planned. That doesn't mean you can't sort of work very diligently to create happenstance and luck. And that is the way, in my experience, books become bestsellers. It's not somebody, you know, has this brilliant marketing idea. And just because of that, the book sells. Yeah, well, doing what I do for a living, I concur. I love what you said. It's like, listen to this pitch because this is so important. And this is exactly why I created the bestselling book launch program so that I could create international bestsellers for authors that's fully done for them. When you talk about how important it is to promote 100%, right? They say 5% of every book is writing it. 95% of the book is what you do or don't do after. But the climate has changed so much right now. I think how people read, what people read, everything. And we're still shifting. So what is your contention? What would you recommend that an author do today to really successfully promote their book? The very first thing they should do is promote other people's books. The very first thing, if you have your own podcast, interview other authors, obviously only authors whose books you actually respect and like. So because today, you have to be an integrity, you have to be transparent. You can't fool people. But I'm sure there's a dozen, 100 maybe, authors who would be delighted if you promoted them. Just do it and don't ask, oh, now that I've promoted you, I want you to promote me. Just do it. And a certain number, I mean, obviously you need to promote enough so that the people who have been on your show, you send out an announcement. So they're aware when you do a book that you've done a book. And I'm willing to bet that at least 50% of the people that you've helped will just automatically say, oh, I see you've done a book. Why don't you be on my webcast? Why don't you do something with me? Or just have them mentioned in their social media that you've got a book that's come out. And I think that's a strategy that can work. Beyond that persistence, you have to try everything. I mean, nobody knows what the next tiktok's gonna be. You know, it's out there, someone's creating it right now, explore. Right now, what Waterside is focusing on are NFTs. We just had the first NFT, non-fungible token. It's a new category of, it's been used for art, it's being used for a number of things. The first option was held by Christie, I think about four months ago, and an artist created something, I haven't even viewed it. The bidding started at 100 and ended up, I think two weeks later at 23 million. And it all has to do with blockchain and cryptocurrency and things I don't understand. But what I do understand is that it's something new that's getting a lot of attention and that can generate a lot of money. So we have a client, John Fisher, who had written a book for entrepreneurs, and then he has a new book coming out that is really inspired by a commencement speech he gave at the University of San Francisco. And it's about how you can combine sort of higher values and focusing on family and still be successful in business. You can be a nice guy and still make a lot of money. And so this book isn't even gonna be published until I think September or October. But John is all, he's all about technology. So he called me and said, Bill, I think we should do an NFT. I said, what's an NFT? And he explained, and so we did do an NFT and Wiley participated in it. Anyway, the auction closed, we did the whole thing in like two weeks, the auction closed on Monday, and his NFT trading card, he's not like Steve Jobs or he's well-known in Silicon Valley but not a big, big name, sold for $13,000 worth of cryptocurrency. So we're immediately discussing how can we create a division of Waterside where we can create an auction NFTs for our authors. Now, even if the, an author is only able to, I'm not sure what the cost of doing these NFTs, it could be several thousands of dollars and it may be, if you're not well known, you don't even recoup that in your auction. But it would still be a great way to promote your book. You can create an NFT that includes the cover of your book. In John's case, he included a link to his speech, a link to his publisher. So this is something, you know, this brand new that I think is going to have, you know, major impact on the promotion of books and hopefully major impact on generating revenue for authors. Wow, that's awesome. I've never heard of that before. So more to be revealed. Yes, that is really new and cutting edge. And I'll also be following what you end up doing if you incorporate that a lot. Yeah, I think we're gonna do, I mean, this is so new. I mean, John and I are just in initial stages, but yeah, we're thinking about, you know, we should create a company and make this service available to all authors, not just our own clients. And John is very connected. He's one of his companies, includes John Elway, the famous quarterback, and I think he's one of the owners of the co-owners of the Denver Broncos. So through John Elway, John Fisher has access to some famous athletes. So we're probably gonna do things for athletes. Cause one of the things, if you get the bidding high, even in John's case, I think he gave 50% of the revenue to his charity. And, you know, I see a lot of celebrity authors who, you know, probably will want to do this. It's a way of bringing attention, not just to themselves, but also to their favorite causes. For people who are writing a book, is, do you believe that there is such a thing as writer's block? What do you think that is? Well, not for me, but yes, I think that, you know, we're all individual. There's, you know, obviously it exists. People write about it. People suffer from it. I've just never, I mean, to me, I grew up in a publishing family. And, you know, to me, writing was a job. I mean, you write. I mean, this is what you're paid to do, you do it. And it doesn't mean that in every moment you're inspired and are writing well. Sometimes when you're writing, you look at it the next day and you have to throw it in the trash because it wasn't very good. But you just write and it's like anything. The more you write, the better writer you become. And I mean, I know when, you know, we give a course, a power of publishing course and we discuss writer's block in it because it is a problem for a lot of people. And I have a lot of techniques that I recommend that I've learned from other writers who have had writer's block that has helped them. You know, and it's really very simple. You set up a time and a place where you don't allow any distractions and you do it on a regular basis and more than likely you're gonna start writing. And the other thing that is, you know, psychologically very important, you don't wait for perfection. You don't wait for inspiration. You create, I mean, when I write, I create an outline, particularly if it's nonfiction. It's harder with fiction, I admit. But for nonfiction, you create an outline, you have to know where you're going and then you just make a commitment. I'm gonna write two hours a day. And you don't even have to do it every day. You can do it every other day. But if you write two hours a day, every other day, you'll be surprised you're gonna have a finished book in a few months. It's not gonna be a year. And for you as a writer, do you have any particular writing rituals that help you get in the flow? I do, actually. When I'm writing novels, for nonfiction, I mean, frankly, I don't need any help. It's just there. I mean, I just do it. But when I'm writing a novel, I do need help. I mean, because you're thinking, you go to bed, you're dreaming, you're thinking of your characters, you're thinking what's gonna happen, how are you gonna move things along? So one of the things that I like to do is I'm very fortunate I live near the beach. So I go down to the beach and I walk for an hour, hour and a half. And I think through as much as I can what the next scene's gonna be, what the next character's gonna do. And then I come back out of my way and boom, sit down and write. That's beautiful. Haven't they said that some of our geniuses, that is what they do. And they almost typify it like a walking meditation. I believe Steve Jobs did that. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. I mean, I think the great, I mean, he won the Nobel Prize for his songwriting is Bob Dylan. And Bob Dylan and his autobiography admitted, he didn't even know where those lyrics came from. If you go back and look at some of Bob Dylan's songs, I mean, at the time he wrote them, they were changing, life-changing songs. Revolutionary. They were amazing. And Bob himself has said, I don't know where it came from and I could never do it again now that way. I mean, he's still a good writer, but there is inspiration. And one of the things that many scientists are starting to believe is deep reality exists at a level that is not what we on the surface consider reality. And when we are able to access the zero point, which is hard to explain because the zero point is kind of like Borges' The Aleph. It's a point that is no point, a space that is no space that contains everything past, present, and future. Because the reality that we live through, obviously we have human bodies and we have to do things linearly. But that doesn't mean that is the ultimate level of reality. The ultimate level of reality may be that everything coexist simultaneously, that there is no past, present, or future, that it's all just is. And if that's the case, then you might be able to explain not just a Bob Dylan, but a Mozart and other extraordinary performers who are somehow accessing that zero point. And it's really their ability to access the zero point that makes them so extraordinary. And it doesn't mean they're not, with their personality, still extraordinary, but it does change the view of what is really genius. Is really genius the individual or the individual's ability to tap in? Oh my God, I've such goosebumps listening to you. This is so beautiful and brilliant. I just feel like what a huge nugget. So I know a man who uses zero point. This is an older gentleman. And I don't even know what his age is now, but this guy, I mean, he was the bomb.com because he would say, you know, if everything exists, then that means that I can sing. And he was never a singer. And it was literally like, he got some little rinky dink synthesizer and just started singing. And he was actually like, it was crazy, he was good. And then he said, well, if everything just is, then inherit me and everywhere else, I'm a photographer. I'm going to go be a photographer. And he would go out to the beach and take these pictures. And wouldn't you know, within a month, his photos were being shown at galleries. So that story to me was so much a reference point of what is actually possible. And for people who are listening, whether they've written books or not, I feel like this is a door opener you've given, giving them to even say for those who may have the writer's block or may be wondering, gosh, can I do this? The truth is, if everything is, then of course you've also got writer in you and you've got the most famous writers going through you just like Stardust is part of you. No, I mean, I have one client who believes that Will Shakespeare and half a dozen other major authors are constantly communicating with him at night and inspiring his writing. And he's a very successful writer, but I don't want to name him because that's awesome. But yeah, I mean, the world is more miraculous than we perceive. And I have another client, Dr. Shah, you can see his calligraphy here and he's a healer. And when you were talking about this older gentleman, we reminded me of Dr. Shah. He's living in a different universe. He's a healer and he keeps discovering new ways of healing and chanting. Anyway, he discovered calligraphy is a way to heal. This is actually part of a healing calligraphy. This happens to be the death, but he's actually developed over the last five years and he had never studied calligraphy as a child. He found a grandmaster. She was actually over 100 years old who was the last calligraphy teacher for the emperors of China's family. Anyway, he worked with her and this is a special kind of calligraphy she taught. And he's now created hundreds of calligraphies which he and his students have been using around the world to actually heal in ways that defy what we consider normal healing modalities. So I think that, and he's someone who puts no limits on himself and therefore, whether through his singing or through his art captures what he believes is this essence from whether it's the zero point when you call it something else. And that's what is really doing the healing. In my case, I could never imagine myself as a singer because I've never been a singer and I just, as much as I believe that it could be possible, ah, I've got enough I'm doing already. I'd really have to focus on that and it would be a big hell to climb. So I think that everything is possible but we are finite human beings. We have a finite amount of time in these bodies though we're getting, look, I've got scientists I'm working with like Nassim Harriman and others who are suggesting, no, we may be able not to create immortality but certainly double or triple the lifespan of the being. But even if you double or triple it, it's still limited, particularly when you look at the scope of eternity. So, we have limitations as humans. I think that's a good thing actually because if we had no limitations, there'd be no deadlines to get things done. I think things would be chaotic, you know? But in any event, you know, so you need to, you know, you need to take stock. What gives you joy? What do you really enjoy doing? And you should do more of that which you enjoy doing and less of that which you don't enjoy doing. I feel very, very lucky. I've created a world in which basically I only do things that I want to do. I mean, everyone wants to do something I have to do but, you know, get a shot, I hate that. But other than that, you know, there's very few things that, you know, I do unless I want to. And, you know, I think that's one of the reasons I'm kind of always happy and productive because I'm only doing things that I really wanna do. Well, you mentioned your program so I want people to know about it. Should they want to get involved? It's called Get Writing, Get Published. And I know in the program you get the knowledge that authors need to succeed with guidance from a super agent like you. It's only $129, like, right? It's a no-brainer. You gotta, why wouldn't you say that? Yeah, no, it's an incredible value. I only created it because I got annoyed at the emails I received from sometimes competent but hyping how easy it is to write a bestseller. It's not easy to write a bestseller and I've been chastised by the marketing people Bill, you're too honest. You're telling too much information. You're turning people off. The way to get people to take your courses you gotta tell them it's gonna make them rich and it's easy. Well, that's not really the case. It's unlikely to make you rich. It's not easy to write a great book but with our course it's a lot easier and it'll save you a lot of time and, you know, you'll be happy with the experience. Well, it's a gift. So for people who are interested in Bill's course called Get Writing, Get Published, I have made a very sweet little link for you and that is http colon b-i-t dot l-y slash Bill Glad. So it's b-i-t dot l-y slash Bill Glad. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can look below. Now, when you subscribe also go ahead and you can find his link there to get his course or if you're listening on podcast it will be in the show notes. So we'll take care of you there. Bill, for somebody like you who's lived your life, your family's life and now your life in books, is there one book that was pivotal for you? Like a reference point book that changed your life? Yeah, there's two. The most important actually because I was very young was Albert Camus' Notebooks, His Diaries. My mother gave me a copy of it when it was translated obviously from the French and I read it when I was just 15 years old and it really inspired me to wanna be a writer and because of that I started writing a journal myself and so I would say that was the most important book. As a little kid, the most important books were all of the Oz books. I love the Oz books. My mother read all of the Oz books to me, TikTok and Oz, not just the first one. I think he, Balm wrote over 20 different Oz books and I think my mother read them all to me but my mother loved to read and that was very pivotal for me but then the Camus book was very, very important and then later when I was at Yale, I was very fortunate and I had a marvelous teacher, Amy Rodriguez Monagal who was actually Borges' biographer and who knew everyone personally in the Latin American boom. He was originally from Montevideo. He was teaching at Yale and he gave a course and I don't know how I got into the course. I think the universe really sets things up because I was only a freshman at the time and it was a graduate course but I happened to be fluent in Spanish so somehow they let me in this course. There's only about 20 graduate students and myself and it was the most amazing course because we had to read two huge books every single week comparing a North American and a South American writer and the week that was pivotal for me was the week when we were assigned to read Faulkner's Absalon Absalon and Gabriel García Montecas is the Anioste Soledad 100 years of solitude and Faulkner's a good writer but I can't even remember the details of Absalon Absalon. I remember every character and every scene from 100 years of solitude. I ended up reading that book at least a dozen times in different contexts over the years. I wrote my thesis at Yale about it and very serendipitously I ended up having a direct relationship with Gabriel García Montecas because the editor for my novel, The 12 in Spanish at Planeta was also his editor. So she introduced us and I have it actually right here. What was that like? I mean somebody you've revered, you've been reading, ingesting and all of a sudden there they are in the flesh. This is the copy that Gabriel García Montecas autographed for me and inside it's all in Spanish. Instead of the Anioste Soledad he changed it to Tienaños de Felicidad but a William Gladstone con un gran abrazo de su colega y amigo Gabo. So this that means in English 100 years of happiness for William Gladstone with a big hug from his colleague and friend Gabriel García Montecas. So this actually is my most prized possession in the world. I really feel that Tienaños de Soledad is the best written novel I've ever read, ever. And it's a magical book. It just changed my perception of what great writing could be. Have you ever tried to take the tenets of that book that you found so magical and incorporate that into something you've written? No, because I can't write that well. It's not my style. I mean, I can appreciate what Gabriel García Montecas was able to do. I have a much tercer writing style. I'm sort of just the fax man. I mean, I had to work very hard to develop dialogue when my first novel that really became a bestseller I worked with a wonderful writing coach, Marie Rowe who had worked with some of the top film companies and producers in Hollywood. And she went through my manuscript after it was already second or third draft and said, you've got to show it in the dialogue. You don't have enough dialogue. So I had to go back and do a fifth or sixth draft in which I really worked on the dialogue. But I enjoy writing. I think I'll be writing more novels again in the future. But I enjoy so many other things. So I think that it's rare that you have a really great novelist who's also writing nonfiction. Nonfiction is so much easier for me and I can get just as excited about nonfiction. And what I like about nonfiction is the plot and the characters are already there. You don't have to invent them. When I wrote my novel, The Twelve, I used a lot of my personal family history and that made it easier. And it is interesting that both Gabriel García Marekis and my other clients who's had great success as a novelist, Victor Villasenor with Rain of Gold used their families as sort of the substance of the book. Because I think that writing, even when you're doing magical realism, needs to be based in actual human beings and actual situations that an author can understand. Just the other day I was watching the movie Passage to India and it just reminded me what great writing can do or great filmmaking. I mean, it really can trick you into awareness that you otherwise would not have had. Really good writer sort of has you posed to like or dislike a character and then all of a sudden everything goes upside down for the first time have to accept the point of view that you were against as not being wrong. And so that's one of the reasons I think writing is so important. And it operates on a much more subtle level. I mean, you can give speeches and you can have demonstrations but do they really change the way we perceive each other? Do they really make a difference? I don't think they make as much of a difference as someone who dedicates 20 hours to reading a book that so changes their internal dialogue that they start saying the world differently. Some of the authors that you work with, I can say one name, people will know who they are, Eckhart, Deepak, Neil Donald, right? So and you've also co-produced the film Tapping the Source. Clearly you're spiritual, I'm making a message. Well, it's not so clear. It may be clear in hindsight, but my father was a chemist. Mm-hmm. My mother was the spiritual one. So I was always with sort of a foot in two different ways of looking at the world. My father was very much an agnostic in terms of, I mean, I remember when he was in his last days wanting him to sort of accept that, there could be an afterlife. And he was, look, I'm a chemist. He was a very, before he became a publisher, he worked with one of the top chemists in the world. And he said, look, I'm a chemist. I know what's gonna happen to me when I die. The molecules are gonna go back into the earth, and that's the end of things. There's nothing after that. And meanwhile, my mother, who was very spiritual, she was also pretty much an agnostic. She did not, we were Jewish by culture, but I wasn't even bar mitzvahed. So spirituality didn't play that big of a role. But yes, I can't help my own way of looking at the world, I think is spiritual. But I would say that the main event that created that was when I had a near-death experience when I was 15 years old that opened me to the realization that the world that we perceive is not the whole world. It's not complete. Did you come back changed after your NDE? Yes and no. I mean, because at the time I had it, you have to understand this was more than 50 years ago and it was not popular. And I shared the experience with my parents and their advice was you shouldn't talk about this too much. You're valedictorian. You're captain of the baseball team. Just, you know, you're having a good life here. Don't get into all this weird stuff. So I pretty much followed what I was told. And then every five or 10 years, I would sort of be in the conversation and suggest, you know, this near-death experience. And the answers back then were pretty much the same as my father's. Oh, you know, you were hallucinating, your oxygen was cut off to the brain and you know, you imagined all this. But I knew I hadn't imagined it. Though I wasn't 100% sure, how can you be sure? But as time evolved, I started to meet authors who were experts in this field. And now we have hundreds of thousands of documented cases of near-death experiences. And so now I'm completely comfortable with my experience as being totally authentic. And yes, it's very reassuring because my experience, hey, life is wonderful, not life is wonderful too. Because you've been called a bodhisattva, masquerading as a businessman. Well, that was, yeah, there was a Tibetan monk who called me that. His name was Bridge. I never really asked him the derivation of his name. Yeah, he was a character. And yes, that's what he, he did my horoscope and all kinds of things. And I lost touch with him. But yeah, he said, you're just a, you know, masquerading as a businessman. Well, so speaking of business, one of the books that you wrote, I like the title, it's called Be the Deal, an unconventional guide to negotiating success in business and in life. So these are secrets throughout the book that you share with people as someone who is an incredibly successful literary agent and publisher. So are there some unconventional tips that you can offer to us that you yourself have used, maybe your clients have used, that have created success and maybe more importantly, have sustained the success? Well, what's very interesting about Be the Deal is it's not confined to book deals. I don't, you know, talk about it a lot, but, you know, I've been involved with mergers and acquisitions. That book starts with, I mean, I don't know, I get myself in these strange situations. I was representing a company that was trying to sell its main asset and the software programmers were in San Luis Obispo. The money people who financed it were in Denver, Colorado and the buyer was in New York and I was in Kauai and everything was falling apart. The Denver people and the California people ended up disliking each other so much that they were threatening to sue each other if the deal fell through. Meanwhile, the company buying was basically Orthodox Jewish people who were really, you know, it's sort of like in a positive way doing business with Israelis if you've ever, you know, they're very tough negotiators and so it was a very, very difficult negotiation. And I remember it got to the point where the only way the deal could happen is we had to put, because you have to have warrants, you know, everybody has to warrant the originality and ownership and because the two parties, Denver and San Luis Obispo were gonna sue each other if the deal fell through, they didn't wanna sign the warrants. So I don't know whether I came up with the idea or somebody else, one of the legal team, but they came up with the idea that they would sign the warrants and put the warrants in escrow and they would only be released if the deal went through so each party could still sue each other if the deal fell apart. So this was very complicated and I was in Kauai and this was before we had cell phones and I had like three different phones and the batteries kept dying because I had to negotiate the entire deal and nobody from the Denver side and the San Luis Obispo side would even agree to be in the same room. They hated each other by this so much. Somehow the deal got done, everybody, you know, walked away happy but I tell that because it's not always what you think. What is negotiating? Some people think that, you know, it's like extracting the last nickel out of a deal. I don't even try to do that. I don't even wanna do that. I tell all my clients, a deal that sounds too good to be true is too good to be true. Every party must benefit from every negotiation. I never look at it as the majority of literary agents do. The client, the client, the client, I've got to get the client as much money as possible. That's the only thing that matters. That's my fiduciary responsibility. No, my fiduciary responsibility, and I talk about this in view of the deal, is to the intellectual property. I want this intellectual property to reach its highest audience, to generate the most revenue it can for the benefit of everyone involved, including the publisher. My father was a publisher, so I know how difficult it is as a publisher to actually make money. And it's not, yes, the publishing contracts are very one-sided in favor of the publisher. But when things work, both author and publisher benefit, and I've always focused on long-term relationships and looking at the entire picture around intellectual property rather than feeling that I'm just representing the side that I'm officially representing. So I have a different way of looking at things, and I think this applies to really any kind of negotiation. It's not just around books. It's not just business negotiation. You really have to put yourself in the place of the other party and respect what they're going through and then come back, doesn't mean you give up your own values or your own way of looking at it, but you're gonna have a better long-term outcome if you truly respect the issues that the other party has. Do you have a ritual or some kind of practice, Bill, that you do every day that keeps you grounded, that keeps you, I mean, you're incredibly animated and alive? The main ritual, I don't do it as much. For many, many years, the first thing, and it wasn't so much a ritual, but I would wake up and my very first thought was, how can I save the universe today? That was it. So that was kind of like a ritual. And it was kind of a joke, because I mean, I'm just me. How can I save the universe? It's not my job. Well, it is my job, but it was the universe of each one of my clients, because for my clients, I mean, somebody may have spent a whole year writing a book. How do we save the day when the book is canceled or things happen? So I took that very seriously. I would say today, my most important ritual of the day is kissing my wife. I think it grounds me more than anything else. And she's a much better human being than I am. I can be very selfish and I can lose my temper and do the things that most people do anyway. She's kind of close to a saint. He has her occasional moments, but she's always giving and always helping others. So I'm really inspired by her and I think that she grounds me more than anything. Well, this is Dare to Dream. So Bill, what do you next dare to dream? What are your future dreams and goals? Right now, it's funny because when I started Waterside Productions, gosh, it's gonna almost be 40 years ago, I didn't start it to be a literary agency at all. That's why it was called Productions. My goal then, my dream then, was to produce an Academy Award-winning film. So it's funny how things come full circle, but that is actually my primary focus right now. Working on a number of film projects I'll probably end up not just representing the properties, but having some role on the production end as well. So that's, check back in a year and we'll see where we are. But what's nice is if it happens great, but it's not, and that's one of the things I've learned, non-attachment. It doesn't mean that you don't passionately crave an outcome. There's nothing wrong with that, but simultaneously you're not attached to any specific outcome. If it happens, wonderful, but it's really the journey is the reward. As long as you show up and every day do everything you can to enhance that dream, to enhance that, in this case, possibility of an Academy Award-winning movie, hey, you're having fun, you're doing what you came here to do and the outcome itself, well, that's really up to the universe. Is there anything you wanna say here at the end to the listeners? Well, you should all be of good cheer. I think this pandemic is coming to an end or at least it's highly reduced. You're gonna be able to do things again that we haven't been able to do for a while. So we should all rejoice on that. And at the same time, we should all step up our game. We should all step up our level of awareness and our level of gratitude for everything that is positive in our lives. And if you'll focus on the positive and that probably is my secret sauce. Bad things happen, I kind of ignore them. I don't ignore them to the point that they're gonna hurt me, but I don't pay much attention to them. Oh, well, it's too bad and I just move on to something positive and there's always something positive. So I leave that message to everyone. Thank you, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's been just awesome. Bill came and taught my book writing class and now he's here and I'm just deeply appreciative that you are so open and transparent and willing to step up and share at the level you do. I think it's very helpful. Well, I hope it is and I enjoy doing it. So we'll do it again sometime. Yeah, we'll check you out in a year when I am on the red carpet interviewing people for your film. I see. Okay, very good. Beautiful, so folks who would like to purchase that program again, it's only $129 if you are listening to, and that's $129. If you're listening to Dare to Dream or watching Dare to Dream, go to bit.ly slash Bill Glad, one word, Bill Glad. And I end today's show with this quote from Bill Gladstone. Greatness consists of not getting in the way of what is meant to be. Subscribe to the Dare to Dream podcast to hear every week's number one transformation conversation next week back for his third time with Lee Strieber, who's an American writer best known for his horror novels, The Wolf and the Hunger, and of course his personal account on E.T. Abduction Communion. The man is a writing beast and a force to be reckoned with and of course an amazing storyteller. I very much look forward to our next conversations. Hey all, you Dare to Dreamers. If you've enjoyed this show and if you want another option, there's also a monthly book writing program that I run and you show up live anywhere in the world on Zoom and I coach you to write your book. The authors are so successful. You can check them out here on YouTube. You'll hear some of their stories and even the book that they've written that has become an international bestseller. So I teach you how to do the page turner and make it an amazing book. 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