One-Book-a-Year Success in Historical Fiction while Working the Day Job with Lars D. H. Hedbor

326 / How do you build a writing career while juggling multiple passions, a day job, and changing marketing strategies? Lars Headbore shares his one-book-a-year strategy as a historical fiction author and how he connects with readers at in-person events. 

✨ This week’s sponsor is Bookfunnel: https://bookfunnel.com

• Starting a writing career later in life
• Defining success beyond sales numbers
• The power and limitations of in-person book selling
• Navigating major shifts in social media and advertising
• Creating unique reader subscriptions and resources for educators

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• Access to backlist of exclusive supporter episodes
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⚡Links:

• Bookfunnel: https://bookfunnel.com
• larsdhhedbor.com
• https://tfar.us/rar

Transcript

Jami 0:03

Welcome to Wisconsin. I'm Terra Rodette. And I'm Jamie Albright. And this week on the show we have Lars Headwar. Yes, we do. It was a really great interview. We met him at Author Nation last year. He writes about the American Revolution.

Sara 0:21

Right, yeah. So he does historical, but not World War II, the most popular subcategory in historical. So we talked a little bit about writing in fiction. Yes, fiction, writing fiction in category in historical fiction that's not as popular and how sometimes that can be a good thing. He also does one book a year. So I thought this was interesting for a follow-up to last week because we talked about can you be successful writing at a slower pace? And so this he really talks about how he writes one book a year and that's all he does. And he also has a day job. So we talked about all that, a little bit juggling all that and how he does it. So that's coming up. We have a sponsor this week, Book Funnel. We will talk about them more in a little bit.

unknown 1:03

Yeah.

Sara 1:03

So what's your update this week?

Jami 1:06

I started a new book today. I wrote I've got one chapter.

unknown 1:10

Woohoo!

Jami 1:11

It's a good deal. But yeah, I uh I have been thinking about it for a few months and you know, I gotta think about it. I wrote a rough outline very because I don't outline and I've already one chapter and I've already strayed from it. So um, but it just kind of gave me some ideas. I know how the book's gonna end, so that's always good because that then I can write to the end. I had another book signing in my little hometown. How'd that go? It was good, it was really good. It was at a dress shop of all places. They had called to ask, well, they called and asked me to do it. They were having kind of a big event, they had a big sale going and some other things, like they had somebody doing permanent jewelry and they had giveaways, it was good, but I think my mother had a she has the best time at these. Like that's you need to have her go and be your handler. Exactly. It's for her. Um, this lady came in that wasn't from Kaufman, and the owner said to her, because the lady asked about me, they were a little ways away, but I could hear them. And the owner said, Oh, well, you know, she's this is Jamie Albright. She writes books, she's been writing for a while. She has some romantic comedies, but then she has this other book that is this book is very big in our town. Like it is a very big deal in our town. And really talking you out. Everybody is talking about it. And I was like, oh my gosh, I I'm I made it. I'm a big deal in this town. Me, along with, you know, that that song by Miranda Lambert, Everybody Does Famous in a Small Town. Well, it's the same thing. Yeah. Me and the high school cheerleaders and the guy that got the first buck of the season. So we're all we're all up there. Very important people in the town. Yes, exactly. But that's it for me. I'm just we've been kind of running around and summer's summer. Summer is summering, as they say. I don't know if anybody says that, but you know what I'm saying. Um we're leaving Sunday, this coming Sunday for a week-long trip to Florida. So it's just a lot, you know, we just a lot going on. We're running around.

Sara 3:43

That's me. I mean, and if you got some words in during all that, that's great. Yeah. Well, today. Today I got work in. We'll see. Yeah. I mean, well, that that blends in perfectly with what I was going to talk about because I've just been working on the manuscript. Yes. Nothing very exciting. I had all those issues last week with my Scrivener. And Scrivener syncing with Dropbox and Dropbox updated. Found everything. I had to reconstruct the last three chapters, but I found them, pulled them back in, everything's all good. But while I was poking around in Scrivener looking for all these things, it has a writing history, and I've never really looked at it. And you can go in and you can look at, you know, how many words you've written each day, how many words you've written each month. And so I was like, oh, this is cool. I was just kind of wasting time because I wasn't really ready to get back in the inscript. So I was like, let's look at this and see what's going on. And so I started this book in January. And in January, I had negative 237 words. So it keeps the negatives for you just to help inspire you, you know, deleted.

Jami 4:44

Oh, you deleted them. Yeah. How do you get negative 237 words? It was a rough riding day.

Sara 4:55

But anyway, so I have known this about myself, but just seeing this really emphasizes that I like consistency. I like discipline is one of my strengths. So I like to write a little bit each day, but I'm slow, especially in the beginning. So in February, I had a thousand, I mean, that's total words that month. March, 415, April, 5,000, then May, 9,000, then June, 16,000, and July, 8,000. So you can see the slow, super slow start while I'm figuring everything out. And then all of a sudden I'm like, okay, I know where I'm going. And then it gets easier and it gets faster. So seeing that in black and white, I was like, okay, so I just need to not be frustrated when those first that first month is negative words. But then it's like 400, you know, but I had other stuff going on. So in I think it was February and March was the launch of the trope book. And then we had the retreat we were doing. So there's a lot of other non-writing stuff going on then too. So yeah, that impacts it too. But anyway, I just thought that was interesting that it's for me, it's like a very slow uphill climb in the beginning. And I just need to remember that. And maybe I won't be as frustrated next time. So right.

Jami 6:12

I mean, I, you know, it took me three and a half hours to write one chapter. I mean, that's I think that's about normal. Chapter is always so hard and it will change. Yeah. I'm like, why am I spending all this time on this? Because I know this is going to change, but I have to get it as right as I can before I can go on, because that is to me the foundation of the book right there. I get that.

Sara 6:36

I get it. So yeah, that's like all I got this week. We appreciate all our supporters that have signed up for the last couple of weeks. We really appreciate you guys. And we had a question today about finding the supporter episodes on Substack. And yes, the supporter episodes are on Substack. If you sign up over there, you can find them. They're just in with the post, but they're unlocked for you as long as you sign in on the email that you signed up with. We have like 20 plus episodes that you get access to if you support the podcast. And then you also get a shout-out on the podcast. This week's sponsor, our corporate sponsor, is BookFunnel. Yeah. So we love BookFunnel, as always. We always say we love them.

Jami 7:16

Yes. Well, I mean, we do. We do. Yeah. We love Damon and we love, you know, just the whole crew over there. They're amazing.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

Yeah.

Sara 7:25

One of the things that I really like about them that I'd kind of forgotten was a feature that is something that I was so excited about when it first launched was landing pages. You have a built-in landing page with every book funnel link and you can customize it and make it look how you want. And that to me, I remember when it launched, I was like, oh, thank goodness I don't have to pay anybody to host my landing pages because that's all included. So it's just one of the little things they do that it it helps. It makes it simple to get everything set up and then you don't have to have another subscription or something else to maintain for landing pages.

Jami 8:04

So can you tell the listeners what you would use a landing page for, Sarah?

Sara 8:08

Well, if you're giving away a reader magnet, you would use it for that, for art copies. You can customize the look of it, the text and everything. And you know, I think you can also do send it to a separate page that you host yourself if you don't want to use the one they have built in. I've never done that because I'm fine with what they've created. Yeah, me too.

Jami 8:29

We love them. Thank you, BookFunnel, for sponsoring the the episode and um we really appreciate it.

Sara 8:34

If you're interested in BookFunnel, you can find them at bookfunnel.com. Do we have anything else for this week to share? Nope. Nope. We should get on with the interview. It's a great one. Yeah, here is Lars. Today we're really excited to have Lars Headboard here. Hi, Lars. How are you? I'm doing very well, thank you. Let me read your bio so people will know a little bit about your background, and then we'll jump into the questions. Lars is an amateur historian, linguist, brewer, cuckoo clock restorer, fiddler, astronomer, and baker. Professionally, he's a technologist, high school foreign exchange coordinator, marketer, writer, and father. His love of history drives him to share the excitement of understanding events of long ago and how those events touch us still today. So after that bio, how do you have time to even do any writing?

SPEAKER_04 9:21

It is sometimes a challenge. Fortunately, I only my readers are accustomed to only getting one book a year from me. And so I only write about uh I usually get those done within about a month. So I'm usually only writing about one month out of a year, and that leaves the rest of the year to do all that other stuff.

Sara 9:39

Yeah, and you do have a big backlist, pretty pretty big. You've got some books they can read while they're waiting, right? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Tell us how you got into writing.

SPEAKER_04 9:49

I started out, I was one of those kids who always knew he was going to be a writer, and then it took me 40 years to get around to it. Yeah. I have a friend who had gone to school at Clemson and kept telling me about all the stuff that happened during the American Revolution down in the Carolinas. Okay, I've always heard of the Carolinas being associated with the Civil War, not really with the Revolution. And I I said, I learned best from historical fiction. Do you know of any? He looked around and he says, Oh, it looks like Jimmy Carter wrote one. It's like, oh, cool. I like his poetry. I'll pick up the book. Got about a hundred pages into it, and let's just say that a Baptist preacher should never attempt to explore the sexual lives of his characters. It was very awkward reading. And I put it down and I uttered those famous last words. I think I could do better myself.

Sara 10:39

The start of many an author career, right?

SPEAKER_04 10:42

Yeah, and here I am over a million words later, and later this year I'll have my 19th book out.

Sara 10:49

That's amazing. When did you start? When did your first book come out?

SPEAKER_04 10:52

My first book was published in uh 2011. And 2013 I went indie. And I've like I said, I've published about one book a year since then. I had a couple of them built up before I got published. So I've at least a few more in there.

Sara 11:09

It shows that you don't have to do the rapid release. You can do a slow, steady build and have a readership and have a career, which is great. What is your definition of success?

SPEAKER_04 11:19

So, like many people, when I started out, my definition of success was pretty simple. I'd like to sell books to people who don't already know me and have a reason to love me. I want to sell books to strangers. And now that I do that pretty much every day, my definition of success has changed to being one that frankly I won't be around to see. And that's that I want my books to be read a hundred years from now. I want my books to become part of, and I know this is gonna sound a little bit ambitious, but I want my books to become part of the American literature.

Sara 11:56

I get it. I totally get that. I do. And I don't know if it's something because I write historical fiction too, set in a different time period. But I mean, I remember someone asking me, what do you want to do with your books? And my thought was, I want my books to last. I want them to be around, I want people to be reading them after I'm gone. And maybe that's because we're historical mystery writers and we value the past and want people to continue to read the books. Yeah, I totally get that.

SPEAKER_04 12:22

Well, and one of the things that you become keenly aware of as you engage in writing historical books is everybody you're writing about, unless you're writing very recent history, they're all gone. And I think it's Rousseau who famously said the graveyards are full of indispensable men. And that's something that that that along with Joanna Penn's uh Memento Mori. I I keep it in it's in mind all the time that that we all have just a desperately, ridiculously short time on this planet, what we can do to lengthen that time in some way is to leave a mark.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

Yeah, I agree. What do you wish you had known about writing or craft?

SPEAKER_04 13:11

So for me, the writing is actually the easy part. I've always been a fairly natural writer. I read voraciously, which means that I have a lot of really good examples to emulate. I grew up in a house that had probably more books than the town library had in it. So I again the writing part is the easy part. So I guess I wish I had known a little bit more about how to get started on the marketing part. I have I have a background in marketing, so a lot of it has been relatively natural for me. But at the same time, there's parts of it where I wish I had known to go and study it up a little before I got started.

Sara 13:58

Well, that leads perfectly into what do you wish you knew about marketing? That's my next question.

SPEAKER_04 14:04

So the big thing that I wish I had done early in in my career was I wish I had gotten started with advertising and Facebook. When we hit 2020 and everybody was working from home and staying at home, I started dabbling in Facebook advertising and it just absolutely caught fire for me event. And I was printing money for a little while there. And then Facebook went and nerfed all the categories that fit my readers in part, and I I don't want to get too political here, but in part in response to events that happened because I write about the American Revolution. Uh anything that had to do with the revolutionary figures was simply removed as a possibility for me to advertise. I wish I'd I wish I'd gotten into advertising earlier so that I would have had a longer period of uh success.

Jami 14:52

Yeah, yeah. That's great. That's great. What do you what are you glad you know now?

SPEAKER_04 14:58

So one of the things that I'm really good at and have been good at since the beginning of my career is selling in person. Hand selling. I just am good at connecting with people in person and explaining what I'm doing, why they must have one of my books before they walk away. And the problem with that, of course, is that it doesn't scale very well because there's only one of me. And I can't, as much as my wife is tremendously supported. When she comes to an event with me, the thing that she really focuses on doing is anybody who's taking my attention away from a conversation that could lead to sales, she'll jump in and divert them. Your wing woman, right? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the in-person selling doesn't scale very well. And but what is really rewarding about it though is when I have somebody who comes back year after year to the same event, says, okay, I need your latest one.

Sara 15:54

Yeah, exactly. What type of in-person events do you do if you go back to the same ones again and again?

SPEAKER_04 16:00

So I I do I do that there's on the West Coast, which is an awkward place for somebody who's writing about the American Revolution, but there there is one major reenactor event that takes place up here in the Pacific Northwest, and I attend that one, and it's usually very good for me. I also go to a July 4th festival at one of the towns nearby here, and I get up on stage and read the Declaration of Independence in full costume, which is always amazing. And that's a good event for me. But my bread and butter, honestly, is just the holiday markets at the high school and the bazaars and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_05 16:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:36

Those are people who are already looking for something who's that that's educational, yeah. They're already in that sort of frame of mind. People come back year after year or so. Walk up to my booth ready to buy.

Sara 16:50

What's the most unhelpful advice you've received?

SPEAKER_04 16:53

At the time it was good advice, but it in the long run, it turned out to be bad advice getting onto Twitter. I invested a huge amount of energy into building a following there. I would strategically follow people who I thought ought to be following me, followbacks. And I set up an automated system to do a daily post of what's happening in the re in what happened on this date in the American Revolution, and that got a lot of following. But that automated system broke down uh when new ownership changed the ballet model. Okay. Live and learn. And I've been able to repurpose that that content uh in many other ways.

SPEAKER_05 17:29

Oh, that's great. Yeah. That's right.

Sara 17:31

Because you still had your content, right? You still had the bank of content.

SPEAKER_04 17:34

Yep. So now that posts daily, I create it as videos that post daily on every day for a year on YouTube. And I've started also doing it over on TikTok. TikTok is not a natural thing for me. I know that there's I know that there are readers of mine who are on it, but it's just it's not natural to me. So I'm doing it about as poorly as you can and still claim to be doing it.

Jami 18:06

Oh well. Take it till you make it. Yeah. What's the biggest change you've had to make in your thinking?

SPEAKER_04 18:13

I'm still working on this one, and I'm not very good at it yet. And that's and it's the idea that I have to do everything myself.

SPEAKER_05 18:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 18:23

I'm a pretty capable person and I've got a very wide background. You look at my career and you think this is somebody who can't figure out what the devil he wants to do with it. But what that means is that a diverse, diverse career. Yeah, but what it means is that I can do a lot of things and do them pretty well, which means that handing them over to somebody else would require that I settle for them as well. And I'm not very good at that, and I'm trying to get better at it.

Sara 18:55

Yeah, yeah. And you said you also work full-time. So I do, yeah. You have a lot going on. Yeah. So how do you do all this? I know that's a question going through people's minds right now if they're listening.

SPEAKER_04 19:09

This it drives my wife nuts, but I just don't watch television. There's so many programs that we want to watch together, and I just I do not make time for it. And that also means of courts that I am not making time for that together time. It's a trade-off of telling a story of the American Revolution.

unknown 19:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 19:29

People need to understand particularly. That's pretty much how I get it all done.

Jami 19:34

Is I I say that. I see that. You have a lot.

SPEAKER_04 19:38

Uh and during the month of November, I don't sleep very much either, so So that's when you write your book, right?

Sara 19:46

That's when you do your yearly book.

SPEAKER_04 19:48

Yeah. I got started uh using the National Novel Writing Month process. And of course now they've changed that over to Novel November. And I use that again this year. And it's the model that just works for me because it keeps me accountable for making sure that I've got words. At the end of the month, I've got 50,000 words come hell or high water. And I have never missed the first time that I tried it.

Jami 20:14

That's amazing. That's that is really fantastic. And I love that but for that something that works so well for a lot of people and then kind of had a weird thing happen, is still working for you. And I hope it's working for the other people too, because it really was great. I never did, but I I know that it was great. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:33

When I sit down at the end of the day in any day in November, and my word count is short, it just it's just there as a constant hey. Better sit down and get some words on the page. They don't have to be good words. That's the thing. They don't have to be good words, but they've got to be words.

Jami 20:50

Exactly. Exactly. If you were starting over today, what would you do differently?

SPEAKER_04 20:58

I think I probably would have gone indie right away instead of trying to get the validation of a publishing deal. Started off with a small press, and it was wonderful just in terms of giving me the confidence that somebody actually wants to read what I'm writing. They were not well aligned with what I'm doing. And they never they didn't pick up my second, or they didn't explicitly not pick it up, they just never got around to it. And so I started shopping it around to a couple of other publishers. And I actually had one publisher that uh the major publishers said, Yeah, that's gonna be interesting if the language were a little simpler. I was like, No, I don't think so.

Sara 21:35

Yeah it was a sign to to do it on your own, right?

SPEAKER_04 21:40

Yeah, the other thing I probably would have done faster is I probably would have jumped into audiobooks earlier.

Sara 21:46

Yeah. Do you do your do you do your audiobooks yourself?

SPEAKER_04 21:50

No, no, I have a magnificent narrator, Shimon Casey. He's he's doing very well for himself now. But and honestly, if I had Started earlier, he might not have been in the market. Yeah, it all worked out. I wish I had gotten started earlier so that I could beat that market where it is.

Sara 22:09

I wanted to ask you about on your website, you have some subscriptions that people can sign up for. It looks like there's very different categories. One of them was this paperback of the month club sort of thing. And so tell us about those and how those came about.

SPEAKER_04 22:24

Well, I was at one of these in-person sales events, and somebody was looking at my whole rack full of books because I have this ridiculously large backlist. And he said, Yeah, I just wish I could get one of these every month. I said, It's a great idea.

Sara 22:40

Well, how do you how do you do that? What are the mechanics behind all that?

SPEAKER_04 22:45

It's all done by hand. It is not scalable yet. So what that means is that every month, I I literally have an Excel spreadsheet. I have the ebook of the month, which is that's relatively easy. I fill that through the and then I've got the paperback, and then I have the deluxe collector's edition, which is the artback edition of the book. It's the recipe card and the map laminated, and then some sort of an artifact.

Sara 23:11

Okay. So and you package all that up yourself.

SPEAKER_04 23:13

I package all that up myself. And to make sure, and I don't have a lot of subscribers, which is what makes it sustainable for now. If I do end up with a lot of subscribers, I have written down exactly how I package all that stuff, exactly how this goes on the right, this goes on the left, this gets folded on this page. And I do that both for myself so that I can remember month to month how I've done it so that it's consistent for my readers.

Sara 23:37

Yeah, I feel that way with the letters because I've done the letter subscription for this year. Oh, yeah. And I have a spreadsheet with everything. But then I did think, oh my goodness, I want to make sure I have some backup on this just in case something happens. I can't do it. So I've got my assistant can get in there and can do everything that needs to be done and tells you what you're doing each two weeks. Because if it's just you and say you got really sick, then I don't want to leave people thinking, what happened to my letters for this week? So it is something that we don't normally have to think about because we've not normally done recurring subscriptions that we have to fulfill. So exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 24:19

If I were I know that there are places that that will do fulfillment like that for you if you get enough volume, I never had enough volume to make it worth it. So I've done it every month myself.

Sara 24:29

Yeah. But yeah, that's a big job though, too. Do you package it up in a special box or you just put it in an envelope, or how do you send it?

SPEAKER_04 24:37

So the deluxe edition goes in a special box that that has branding and everything on it. And it's a printed box that I had made. And then I put a label on it that has covered. I've got all of that, I've got all of that sort of ready to go. I've got files and slap it on and out it goes. Making sure that I have the artifacts on hand so that I can include those in the problem. Make sure that, okay. This book features people handmaking two laces out of leather. So I need to go get some two laces made out of leather that are gonna be.

Sara 25:13

Yeah. Tell us about that, how that works and why you did that.

SPEAKER_04 25:25

So I write my books with the idea in mind that they could be any of them could be used in a classroom. So I really focus on historical accuracy. And although I don't like the clean dirty dichotomy, I write things, you know, I write in such a way that my work is accessible to the readers. To support that, I make available to any educator who may ask. So I give them a free review copy.

Jami 25:56

Oh nice. Yeah, that is that's good. That's good. I'm sure that helps.

SPEAKER_04 26:01

Yeah. And then I've also got discussion guides that I put together for everybody.

Jami 26:05

Oh wow. Okay. And you of course do that yourself too, right?

SPEAKER_04 26:10

I do. I do, yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing that I'm working on, and I've spoken to some of my educator friends, the thing that they really need is something that shows how the book fits into their lesson plans, and there's a whole there's a whole format and it varies from state to state. Now this is something where I've been using AI to help me out. I've been using the large language models because of course they have access. The large language models have ingested all of those standards. And if I hand if I I think I've I think it was a Google Notebook that I used, I hand it my book, and I say, okay, tell me how this book could fit into this standards for this lesson plan. I'll fit out a lesson plan that I shared one of them with an educator friend of mine from the state where it was targeted. And she said, Yeah, I I could use that.

unknown 27:02

Yeah. Yeah.

Sara 27:03

And your books are targeted, they're too they're for adults mainly, right? But then they're because they're clean and they're historical, they also appeal to teachers and educators, right?

SPEAKER_04 27:16

Okay. Yep. Again, I know that when I was in school, one of the ways that I learned history the very best was by reading good, engaging historical fiction. That was that was always because again, historians can tell you what happened, and historical fiction author can tell you how it felt. Smell. That's the stuff that that sticks with you when you're learning history. The way history is taught in classrooms, and this is probably unavoidable for what they have to do, but it is essentially teaching you how to play trivial pursuit. Yeah, which is not very interesting.

Jami 27:52

It's not interesting and it's not engaging. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 27:56

Yeah, I mean, the number of people I who, when they come up to me in the booth, they're like, oh, I didn't like history.

Jami 28:01

Like I'm a freak, but as an example, and I'm an adult, but after reading the first Outlander, I went and researched the Jacobat war and all of those things that I had no idea. I didn't know anything about that. But then I was interested, and I went and researched, and now I know things that are historically accurate because I went and researched them because it was interesting to me. I'm an adult, but a kid is no different, and I'm probably even more curious than an adult.

SPEAKER_04 28:34

Absolutely. That's also why I I include a very thorough historical note at the end of each of my books. Uh so I can number one tell on myself any place that I've strayed from what's known in history. I don't get the actually emails. Pretty good, I already wrote it. But then also to point people in the direction of here's some further stuff that might find interesting to invest in.

Sara 28:56

Do you include the information about the the questions and stuff you have on your website in your book, or is that just for people that kind of run across it?

SPEAKER_04 29:05

That's so you mean the discussion guides or yeah. Yeah, yeah, those I don't put those in my books. I probably should.

Sara 29:12

Yeah, you should. Maybe a QR code to lead to it or something.

Jami 29:18

Yeah. Yeah, that would be that would probably be good too. Yeah. Well, um, do you find I know Sarah gets this a lot with her historical, but do you get a lot of people messaging you, questioning your the accuracy, or you didn't get this right, or or is it not as much with American history as it is with British history and stuff?

SPEAKER_04 29:39

I don't get a whole lot of that. I did so I had a I was on a television program about 10 years ago, and I got some irate emails from somebody who was vexed that the flag in the background behind me was backwards. Oh, yeah. Oh, and I wrote back to him and I said, My friend, I was on a green screen. That wasn't there when I was there. Yeah. Make it up with the producer. Yeah.

Sara 30:04

Here's their email. Yes. I love how you use the word vexed.

SPEAKER_05 30:10

Yes, exactly. That's a great word.

SPEAKER_04 30:13

Yeah. Well, and because people who are concerned with flag usage and so forth are vexiologists.

Sara 30:19

Oh, okay. Well they're on even. I like it. But you have a store as well. And it looks like you're selling through payhip. Is that right? So do you do ebook, audio, and print through payhip, or how do you sell how do you do your all your formats?

SPEAKER_04 30:34

All of the above. So I have ebook, audio, paperback, and hardback. And then I also run my subscriptions through payhip.

SPEAKER_05 30:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 30:42

Uh and the paperbacks and hardbacks, I fulfill out of my living room. And I keep stock on hand so I can chip out find copies. I do have I have another line of books that are completely not associated with the American Revolution that I also sell through payhip, and I've got that hooked up to Book Vault. So place an order and it just prints and out it goes.

Jami 31:04

That's great. Perfect. Yeah, nice. That is that is great. That is great. Well, Lars, what do you think the best thing you've done to set yourself up for success has been?

SPEAKER_04 31:15

I think the biggest thing I've done that has has really enabled me to just be as successful as I have been, however much that is, is right from the very beginning, I had a vision of this series of books as a series, whether each one of them is set in a different colony or future state. Because I had that experience of not being able to find a good historical fiction book that was set in a particular place during the American Revolution, I set out from the very beginning to fill that gap in the And then the other thing was is that I saw very clearly that there weren't very many books about the American Revolution that weren't being told about or from the point of view of one of these great figures astride their white horses who we all learn about in school. And so I really I set out from the very beginning to tell stories of ordinary people. And that does a couple of things. The first thing is it makes them much more relatable because we're not all George Washington's, we're not all Thomas Jeffersons, but we all are a farmer or keepers. So it makes it more relatable. But then because I can illustrate how these people changed history by not making it into the history, I hope that sets into people's minds the idea that our individual actions shape the future, whether or not we make it into the future history. We don't have to be we don't have to be one of these one of these notable figures to make the future because we can see that people who shaped our current day were not all notable figures. Exactly. Read my books and you get that idea embedded in your mind, and I hope it helps people be mindful about their actions. And right. That's great.

Sara 33:11

I think that's wonderful.

Jami 33:12

Yeah.

Sara 33:13

Yeah, I do too. And I think about World War II fiction is very popular. I'm amaz I'm I'm not amazed, but it is interesting how many different little tiny things that were going on that somebody reads about them and they write a book about these people who were librarians and ran an underground network in some city in Europe. And then there's these other people on the other side of the world that were doing something just as interesting, but we don't know any of their names. And I have a feeling that the American Revolution would be the same. You can find stories everywhere of just average citizens doing incredible things, right?

SPEAKER_04 33:48

Well, and one of the things that that caused me to write about the American Revolution was look at historical fiction. Most of it is about either World War II or the Civil Air War.

SPEAKER_05 33:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 34:00

And World War II, I think honestly, it's a fairly full space and it's hard to compete there. And the Civil War is not only a full space, but it is while it's an important point in American history, the American Revolution is a it's a pivot point in all of human history. And so for that to have so little literature is really just a crime shame. Yeah. So I've sought to fill that.

Jami 34:27

That's great.

Sara 34:28

You're doing a good job. You've got a lot of books out, and it sounds like they're not gonna stop.

SPEAKER_04 34:32

I've I have at this point written more books about the American Revolution than any other novelist in history.

Jami 34:38

Wow, that is amazing.

SPEAKER_04 34:41

And and more pages and more work. I passed, I'm well past a million words. Wow.

Sara 34:45

Yeah.

unknown 34:46

Yeah.

Sara 34:46

So you're the most prolific American revolutionary novelist.

SPEAKER_04 34:50

Yes. Yes.

Jami 34:52

Awesome. Very good. That is great. That should go on your website. I don't know if you have it on there.

SPEAKER_04 34:56

I think it's there somewhere. Yeah. I think it's in my bio at least.

Sara 34:59

It should be front and center. Yeah. Yeah. Tell everybody where they can find you and your books online or in person.

SPEAKER_04 35:07

You can find me, just use my name, my full name, Lars Dh Headboard.com. Lars D asn David, D H S and Haroldheadboar.com. Or if that's too long, you can just do tfar.us. Else from a revolution, f-a-r dot us. And of course, my books are sold. Anyplace books are sold. And I am in all formats. Audio, paperback, hardback, a couple of marie runs, CD. Perfect.

Jami 35:36

Oh my gosh. That's forever. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much for being here. We appreciate it.

SPEAKER_04 35:42

Thank you. I'm I am so thrilled to have gotten to visit with you guys and speak to you and share what I've what I've learned over.

Sara 35:50

Yeah. Thank you for doing it, taking the time. I think it'll be really helpful and give us interesting ideas. Yeah, me and Jamie, as well as everybody who's listening. Yeah, so thank you. Exactly.

SPEAKER_05 35:59

Exactly.

Sara 36:00

Yeah, and we will have all those links at wish I knew for writers.com. And you can go to that same link slash support. And don't forget about BookFunnel. Go check them out. We will see everybody next week. Bye, everybody. Bye.

SPEAKER_04 36:13

Bye bye.