Good evening on this the twenty second year of December, in the year of our Lord 2016.

So I got the idea to interview some of the authors that I know on my youtube channel. Specifically I’ve lined up Russell Newquist and Brian Niemeier. Both men are Catholic, and thoughtful, so I think there’s some rich ground to explore. One of the great things about the Catholic faith is that it is universal in the sense of being for all sorts of men, not for being a cookie-cutter that can make all men alike. That is, I think, the ideal for conversation: enough in common real subjects can be talked about; enough different that different ideas can be exchanged.

Actually, I should mention that Russell is also an indie publisher with a nascent publishing house in addition to being an author. His publishing house is called Silver Empire, and  they’ve got a project in the works called Lyonesse. It’s a way Russell has conceived of making short stories economically viable in the modern age (with magazines having gone the way of the horse drawn carriage. Incidentally, I actually was driving behind a horse drawn carriage two nights ago, for a minute or two, before it turned off the main road. (I think it was some kind of Christmas gimmick.)

I think that we’ll have interesting discussions, but of course one motivation for Russell and Brian is that doing these interviews functions as publicity. But my channel isn’t very big. Right now it’s only got about 170 subscribers. But publicity doesn’t need to be all that big; there is of course the issue that it’s not about how many people you reach but how many of the right people you reach. (By “the right people” I mean people who want to buy what you’re selling.) But for things to reach a large audience without you having to pay for it with money, you have to pay for it with something, and generally that something is interesting content. And that’s where doing an interview on a small-time youtube channel can be worth it. I don’t have many viewers (compared to what you need for selling enough books to make a living at it), but if the interview is interesting, Russell and Brian have friends with larger audiences who will spread the word about the interview. This is related to a mistake that self-published authors sometimes make. Your friends are not your market; they’re your marketing. At least if you write a book that they can be proud of. If you write something they would be embarrassed about, that’s a different matter. But if you do that, you’ve probably got bigger problems on your hand.

Anyway, it’s part of a nice situation where things are mutually beneficial, at least as long as I do a good job interviewing them. 🙂

God bless you.