The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Debra Blaine M.D. – Author, Coach, Publisher Interview

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

Debra Blaine M.D. - Author, Coach, Publisher Interview Debrablaine.com

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All of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, the big LinkedIn newsletter, etc., etc. Today, we have an amazing woman on the show. She is a physician who decided to become an author. And now she's a publisher. We're going to talk to her about her whole journey and everything she does and how she helps people publish books on top of what she does already. So we'll be talking to her. Her latest book came out August 31st, 2022, Beyond the Pillars of Salt. Deborah E. Blaine, Dr. Deborah E. Blaine is here.

I always do that wrong because there's an MD at the end. And you're like, wait, oh, there's supposed to be a doctor. They should just get rid of the MD thing and put doc on the end. That should be like sir, like a title, like you're knighted or something. What do you think, Deborah? Is that a good idea? I love it. Either one's good.

There you go. I'll submit that to the queen. Oh, oh, well, that's not going to work out, is it? Anyway, Deborah is a physician turned author. After 30 plus years practicing medicine, she found that her spirits were in greater need of healing than her body. Boy, you can say that for some people. I've seen them on Facebook. But how can this happen in her fractured society?

Where is it hard to encourage people to open their minds to other points of view hammers no that's not good the judge says i can't do that anymore her answer is truth in fiction the hope is that if readers get emotionally involved in her characters it might make a more lasting impression and perhaps some will think about the critical issues she raises from the safety of entertainment. The truth hurts. Fiction in, I'm sorry, the truth hurts. Truth in fiction gently guides. You know, people do learn better from entertainment.

We call the show Infotainment because we teach people, we educate them, and we make them smile and laugh, or at least they just go, those are really stupid jokes, Chris. Welcome to the show, Debra. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks a lot, Chris. Good, good show, Debra. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks a lot, Chris. Good, good. I'm on a roll on Friday.

I'm hitting all zeros. So give us your.com so people can find you on the show. It's just DebraBlaine.com. I know I'm not being funny when I'm cracking myself up, so that's always a good sign. So Debra, and does that include also your book publishing site? Let me pull that up. Yes, so there's a separate page for my book publishing called Very Indie Press. You can also get there from

veryindiepress.com, and there's also a page for my general coaching practice. Do you realize it sounded like Very Indie Pressed? Oh, no, I didn't realize that. I was thinking of the Indie Presses, and I was so happy to find Very Indie Press, but I think you've just ruined that for me now. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I just like the indie presses and, you know, I was so happy to find a very indie press.

But I think you've just ruined that for me now. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I just do the comedy around here. That's what they pay me the $5 for when I show up every day. So, Deborah, let's get talking about your first book here. Let's get that teased out so people can check that out. And actually, let's wind back a little bit because you have a different journey than most authors.

You did, what, two or three decades being a physician? I did. And what kind of physician are you? You can't give me one word answers. Okay. So I trained in family medicine, but I became a single parent when my son was two. And so I started doing urgent care. And that was two. And so I started doing urgent care. And that was back in 1994.

I started doing urgent care, maybe before that. And it was a whole different thing. But it was a little less stressful than the emergency room, which now is called the emergency department. But it was shift work. So I knew exactly when I would be off, how know, how long I needed a babysitter for. I didn't have to leave the house at, you know, five in the morning to round on patients and that sort of thing. So it worked out pretty well. That's pretty cool. I didn't know they started calling it the emergency. What did you say? The emergency department?

Emergency department. It's now the ED, not the ER, but most people don't know what I'm talking about when I say the ED. I have ED at the ER. But if you say that to another doctor, if you say ER, they look at you like, where have you been? Do they really? I mean, I always did go in and I'm like, this is much larger than an emergency room. Like this is poorly aptly named. But I have seen the ER for the ED.

I don't know what that means. There's a joke there somewhere. You can figure out the little blue pills. So, and then you decide one day to become an author? How do you make this transition? So I just was getting so frustrated and disenchanted with what's happened to medicine. So to be clear, I love medicine. What has happened to medicine, by the way?

Well, I'm going to tell you. It's become the American healthcare industry. It's become a profit-driven, owned by vulture capitalists, I call it. And it sort of peddles human life as a business as if it was selling Apple TVs. And so we are sort of caught in that framework. I'd say over the last six or seven years, it's taken a nosedive. And so the reason I actually wrote the first book, this is my first book, Code Blue, I wrote that because I really wanted people to know what was happening

and what we were going through. The subtitle, The Other End of the Stethoscope, was supposed to be the title title, but I was talked out of that. Because the position that medicine has put us in is that we don't have time to talk to our patients. We don't have the choices to, you know, we can't make the choices we think are appropriate. We have to go with whatever the corporation that owns the practice wants us to do. We can only refer in network now. It's gotten that bad in many cases. We can't get authorization for certain procedures,

for certain medications. We get evaluated on our productivity, which means how much... You get the stuff you need to do your job. No, our productivity is how much money have we brought in to the healthcare organization. And if you're not doing well, you're not going to get

your bonus. And the salaries are now sort of regulated based on the fact that well, you're going to get a bonus. What is it, like commission now? Not quite. But then on top of that, we invite patients to review us after every visit.

Oh, wow. Now, if you thought you were a patient, you're not a patient anymore, Chris. I'm sorry. I'm going to break the news to you. You are a consumer of health care. And this is really, I mean, it's a serious thing. You're seen as a patron of an organization that provides revenue. And so have you ever been to the doctor and you get one of these surveys?

I haven't. I try to avoid doctors at every turn I can. I definitely do, too. I've been pretty lucky in my life. But when you go to a doctor, especially for these big name healthcare centers, you'll get a review, a survey

at the end, and they'll ask you a whole bunch of questions. But what's really interesting is they're not really interested in what the outcome of your visit was. Like, are you better? That's not one of the questions. Oh, really? They want to know if the staff was friendly, and they want to know if you felt happy with your result.

And what they really want to know is how likely are you to visit that same health care institution the next time you get sick. They don't tell you that, but that's really what they're looking for. That's crazy. You know, we see this a lot in different things. But there's a, you know, I get that from GoDaddy or I get that from just about anybody I do customer service. And they send you a thing. And they're kind of designed to get the answers they're looking for, not the answers you want to give.

Like, I'd be like, yeah, I want to tell you about the bad service I got. And there's, like, no things for that. There's, like, no boxes. It's all just, like, one to ten. Tell us where you're at. And then half the time, you're like, you know, I'm pretty sure that if I complain about the company, you're going to fire that person because the person, the wording is like,

did Joe give you a – Right, right. It's all about Joe. Yeah, it's all about Joe. And you're like, oh, man, I want to complain about the company because the company's bad. Joe's just some poor guy, schmo, you know, doing things. Right. Anyway, so you start your first book and write that out.

So what I did was I started writing these little encounters in the book, little patient encounters. Every single encounter in the book is based on a real interaction. But of course the names are changed and subtle changes are made so that you could possibly recognize the person, the actual person. But it was just aimed at demonstrating one more

problem that we have. I just wanted to put that out there, but I realized I couldn't write I didn't want to put that out there, but I realized I didn't want to write that as a nonfiction book because I didn't want to get fired. I didn't want to get sued. So if I start complaining about the healthcare institution and they figure out that's where I work, I'm in big trouble.

So I decided I had to make it a fiction. So when you write a fiction, you need a hero, you need a villain, you need a plot, you need all kinds of obstacles and challenges. And, you know, so that became, you know, it became a whole different project. And I actually wrote two books. I worked with a fabulous mentor. His name is Rich Kervolinolin and he's retired as faculty at USC, I think. And we worked together for a while and he taught me how to create suspense and the

different factors that are necessary in putting into a thriller. So I had like these two books i had the the suspense part which was um the russian oligarchs um hack into our electronic medical records and they steal information extort millions of dollars from the patients and then murder them that was my thriller um and then i had all these encounters that were going on and so then i had i wove them together so that the doctor that you follow around through the clinic becomes, you know, is it becomes a victim of this hacking scheme or becomes part of this entangled in the hacking scheme so that the whole thing became a medical

thriller. But the, the background is all pretty much based on fact. There you go. What kind of patients are you seeing? Russian oligarchs murdering people. What's going on over there at your hospital? I'm just kidding.

It's funny. A couple of people said, okay, so where did this happen? Where did this happen? Which one? I don't know. It's a story, but it sounds like it could have happened. Where did it happen? I just made it up.

All three books are they dystopian fiction uh so the um the second book the third one is the dystopian fiction the second book you know once i was done you know with that book um i wanted i loved writing i realized i really loved writing so i didn't want to stop so what was i going to write about so it was it was 2000 late 2019, early 2020. And I looked around and it just seemed to me that there was so much discord within families and communities and people getting so angry with each other because they're, they believe one way and the other person believes the other way. And instead of being able to talk it out or agree to disagree, you know, all of a sudden, you a sudden there was so much extremism.

And so I wanted to write about that. So that was my second book. I started writing that with... I had three things in mind. I had an opening scene, because you need an opening scene that will grab someone. I knew I wanted to use The Devil's Breath Flower,

which is a real thing. Weiss called it the scariest drug on the planet. the devil's breath flower, which is a real thing. Vice called it the scariest drug on the planet. It's called the zombie drug. I think that's in Florida a lot. Yeah, but it's actually from South America. Eat that with the bath salts, I think, which is weird because your title is Beyond the Pillars of Salt.

No, no, no. For that one, it's Undoing Influences. Undoing Influences. Undoing Influences. So what are the things that are influencing our minds? What is manipulating us as a population that's creating this lack of communication, this resistance to listening to each other? And so it was partly for me to just say, well, there must be a reason people are being so unreasonable. There's a reason they're being unreasonable. Yeah. That's the thing about writing is you create your own world and you create your own outcome and you can make it at least make sense to you. Hopefully it makes sense to other people. The opening scene for that

book is this kid, Joshua, who walks into his uncle's office on 6th Avenue in New York City and he doesn't remember anything about the last three days he can barely remember his name and he's covered in blood it sounds like one I used to drink yeah and in a way but his toxicology screen was negative

so they take him to the hospital his toxicology screen is negative and none of the blood's his. That's always a bad sign, my judge tells me. And that's basically, it's a very personal story about a family who are struggling with the realization that their minds are being manipulated. And there's one person who has some immunity to that for a variety of reasons

who is trying to convince, particularly his wife, to think about things before she just jumps on a platform. You know, just because you identify as a liberal doesn't mean everything the liberals say is something you should jump on. And the same for the conservatives. I tried very hard not to take sides

on that. So that was that book and then, you know, as I was writing it, I was having hard not to take sides on that. So that was that book. And then, you know, as I was writing it, I was having a really hard time finishing it. And I realized I was not going to be able to solve the world's problems in this one book. We had a lot of problems. There's a lot of problems in the world. So I realized I was going to have to write a sequel. And that helped me close up the book.

And so the sequel is Beyond the Pillars of Salt, which is kind of the one possible progression of where our world could be going if we continue. A world without free and fair elections, a world where the planet is breaking up and reclaiming itself due to climate change and just planetary changes and upheavals and how that's going to where does that leave us in a planet

that's becoming uninhabitable and that's leading into my science fiction series which I just started and then after that's the planet of the apes right where the apes just take over it could be maybe that's the planet of the apes right where the apes just take over is that it could be it could be maybe that's another book it's another book but uh lately every now and then when the world's going to hell i had that vision of charlton heston at the on the beach

falling to his knees going you mother whatever you know he's got the statue of liberty there so uh is it the same character uh who's the protagonist running through the whole series? So in the second two books, there are many of the same characters. And the protagonists from Undo Influences are also protagonists in Pillars of Salt, beyond the Pillars of Salt. And what I realized is, so Undo Influences, I wrote it in less than a year, and it took my publisher 11 months to get it out. And it was very frustrating. And when I finished Beyond the Pillars of Salt, I wanted it out faster.

And I said, well, what can you promise me? And she said a year. I was like, a year? What are they doing for that year anyway? I'm just curious. I don't know. And this was a hybrid publisher. I was paying them. Now, I don't want to say anything

bad about them because they taught me so much. And they're good, good people. So I'm not going to, you know, but it was just, you know, that was their timeline. So I said, you know what, maybe I need to do something different. So we have this, one of the closed

Facebook groups is Women Physician Writers. So there's a lot of you. There are a bunch of us. Wow. What's going on in the doctor's office? You guys just got plenty of time to do other stuff. You know what it is? It's just we need to be people. We need to be able to

have some other passion besides the gruel that we go through every day. I prefer doctors that are people because they're machine ones. They're not good with the knives. Well, you want to be able to relate to your patients. You want to have experienced things and understand when somebody has a disappointment. I mean, we're human beings too, and we want to have some time for that. My doctor just runs in the room and throws penicillin at me and runs out again.

Yeah, we try not to do that now because there's a lot of resistance to antibiotics. And they ask us to be antibiotic stewards, but then our patients get really ticked off, and then they write bad reviews for us. I almost got killed by one, yeah. But,

anyway, so she gave me a lot of advice. She publishes all her books herself. She used to use a publisher, and now she doesn't. And she gave me the heads up about a program I could use to format, and she kind of just gave me a few tips. And I figured out the rest, you know, just sort of trial and error. I figured out where I needed to open accounts so that the royalties go right into my account.

Otherwise, so if you, when you sell a book, if you go through, if it's through a traditional publisher or a hybrid publisher, they use Ingram or IngramSparks pretty much universally. So let's say somebody wants to buy your book on Amazon. So Ingram takes 16 to 20% of your book and sends it to Amazon. Amazon takes 40% of your book off the top always. And then they have to subtract from that the cost of printing the book. And then what's left is the royalty. Now Ingram, I think also charges a processing fee, which Amazon does not. So the difference is when I upload my books directly to Amazon, Amazon takes its 40%. And we subtract the cost of printing the book. The rest is mine.

And so I don't have the processing fees. I don't have Ingram's little fingers in there. I'm not with a publisher who's going to split the royalties with me. They're all mine, 100%. And not only that, but I can see in real time within a day or two how many sales I've had on KDP. I can just look at it and see. Barnes & Noble has a similar sort of thing. I can see my sales there. Apple has the same kind of thing. So it just doesn't make sense to me anymore. And plus, when you use a traditional publisher, you lose the rights, as you were just talking about.

You lose the copyright rights. It's technically their text. I was talking to a friend, and they're like, I want to go back and change my... I want to go back and change a couple things. I don't know how much, but it's like, I can't do it. I can't do any of it. I'm like, what if you misspelled some words there, eh?

And I can't do it. I'm like, wow. But, you know, they do a lot of editing. You have to ask your publisher to fix that if you misspelled something. I think, yeah, there's probably a format for that. But, yeah, if you want to change something, you know, a paragraph or something, it's like you're going to have to go through, like, I don't know, the gauntlet of approvals.

So you decided to start your own publishing company. Is it really a publishing company? It's more of a – It's an extension of my coaching practice. Okay. So I'm – because I'm not keeping track of people's sales, which is why, you know, publishing companies have to charge fees. I don't want anything to do with your sales. I'm not keeping track of people's sales, which is why publishing companies have to charge fees. I don't want anything to do with your sales.

I'm not doing bookkeeping. But what I do is I provide them with all the links that they need, all the companies they may want to establish accounts with, where to get their ISBN identifiers and their barcodes. I give them options for choosing editors or they can find their own editors. The same thing with the cover designer. Put it all together, and then we get back together again, and I plug it in the program, and it formats. And then we go through it and make sure everything looks the way they want. They can choose their font, their trim size.

And then I send it to them. They look everything over. If they have anything they want to adjust, we get back together and we fix it. I send them back their files. They upload their own files to the distributors. And I have nothing to do with their book anymore. So I don't have to charge them extra. I just charge them for the time I spend coaching them, guiding them.

I'm available by email or text or whatever it is so that they can get their book out there. And then, you know, they've got their book. I keep their files for about three months. I notify them before I'm going to delete them because it does start to take up a lot of room, a lot of memory. And then I keep the,

yeah, I just keep like a copy of the formatted portion so that I can make adjustments. So let's say you put up your book on Amazon and you realize, or Apple, there's a bunch of typos. Okay, if it's a few typos, we can fix it in the program. If it's a lot, some major changes, just, you know, redo it, change it in your Word document. We'll, you know, I'll re-upload it and reformat it and you can fix it and just upload it. That is awesome. You know, I hear a lot of complaints in the green room when we first, you know, start the show

and we're laying out the foundation for the show and what we're going to do and talk about. And, you know, we have Simon Schuster, HarperCollins. We have great relationships with all the great publishers. They send us to other people. But, you know But I'll hear from authors every now and then that'll be like, man, I didn't even get to pick the cover of my book. I'm like, what? Exactly.

I didn't even get to pick my own title. I'm like, what? And they're like, yeah, they do all that for you and you don't have a choice. And I'm like, you know, if I've got to spend the rest of my life looking at that book cover and that title and representing it to the world and being like, yeah, I wrote the book,

that will drive me mad if the cover is crap or if I don't like the cover. That will make me mental. I'll be like, here, I'll sign your book, but I'm just going to black out the cover. Black out the title. I got the title. There you go. It's personalized, so it's a collector's item. But, yeah, I've had authors on there, like, man, I really don't like it. I've had people say they had to change their chapters or omit a chapter or write a new chapter,

which is why I went with the hybrid in the beginning because I wanted it to be mine. And they were good, you know, And they split royalties 50-50, but it still turned out to be kind of bupkis. And they didn't... So I hired this... When I started self-publishing, I hired my own cover designer. I hired someone who's really well-known.

He's expensive, but he's awesome. He's just amazing. His name is Joe Montgomery. I'll call him out. He's on a lot of covers for many best-selling books. I tell him, this is the genre. This is what the story is about. He gives me five at a time. Hopefully, it's not going to be more than five. I can say, okay, I like this one,

but I want to change this to this, and I want to put this in this one part. Like in Code Blue, the first ones, this part here was something else that I just didn't like. And we were looking for something and looking for something. And I said, what about if you just put like an EKG kind of thing there? And it worked really well. The physician tie-in. well it's about it's about you know it's a it's a medical thriller so we kind of work together on it and like i said he's not cheap but um he's worth every penny and he's he's just such a good soul he's not like he there's no

arrogance or anything he's so talented but he's just a real he's a mensch you know mens but he's just a real, he's a mensch, you know, mensch. He's just a really good guy. And so I've used him now for three covers. And I'll tell you my, my expenses now when I publish a book is, is Joe, my cover designer, I'm getting, I always use at least two editors because I don't trust myself. I've been with this document for all this time and say, you know, they have some ideas and then you need a proofreader.

And but those are my two expenses because I've already bought a bunch of isbns i have the program everything's all set up and it's kind of it you know it's the way to go i mean so many people self-publish i mean ever since kind of amazon i guess started this back in the day and democratized the ability to self-publish. Because there's a lot of people I talk to, like, I have a book, but I can't get any of these big companies to take interest in me. And, you know, if you understand how they work in their game and a lot of their big money that they make is from, you know, if a president writes a book or, you know, some movie star or some TV person writes a book, Oprah or whatever, you know, they're going to some TV person writes Oprah or whatever,

you know, they're going to make a lot of money off that. And then they give smaller royalties down the line. But the real payoff that sells the most books is it's the 80-20 rule, really, when it comes down to it. 20% makes 80% of the money. And so some of that other stuff is filler, and they're like, you know, probably loss leaders. And I guess it's kind of like a studio movie sometimes, like Disney and movies sometimes.

Some suck and bomb. You're like, well, who needed that billion dollars anyway, really? And then some, you know, make $10 billion or whatever the hell they make these days. And so there's that. But, yeah, being able to self- to self publish, publish your own book. I mean, you know, there's so many people that can do it now and get their, their thing out there. It's great for your brand building for speaking, coaching services and stuff like that.

I use mine to swap flies. And, uh, so I guess I'm brochures I use for that. I just keep running the house, knock it off. And that, if I can be, Oh it off. And the author.

So that's one way to go. So there's all sorts of great stuff. So you do the coaching. You help them write their book. Do you help them propagate the idea, flesh out the concepts? Because some people kind of like have an idea for a book, but that's about it. So that's like a separate. So I do both

i'm also a writing coach where i work with people you know who are you know at any stage of writing who just want some advice or i've worked with with some authors who have like barely have an idea for their book but they know kind of what they want to write about um so yes i work with writers it's a different package because that's more of an ongoing, an ongoing sessions. And I'm less, so in my, my coaching practice for physicians, we pretty much meet every week because it's important to kind of, you know, keep that momentum going with writers. I recommend it for the first month. And then like, if they want to, you know, if you haven't done a lot of work on your book, there's no point in our meeting that week. But I try to keep one of the things coaches do is we try to keep people accountable.

That's why you want to coach, right? You want somebody who's going to say, hey, you know, like, I know you were busy this week, but this is something you really wanted to do. Now, if it's not what you want to do anymore, that's okay. But if you really want to do it, you need to make time for yourself to do it. And here are some ways you can do that. So I work with writers as they're writing, and I work with writers as they're publishing. And it's kind of a separate, the publishing thing,

it's a one-time upfront fee. And then we get the book out. Like if it takes us three sessions or five sessions or seven texts or emails, that's fine. It's all part of the same thing. And I won't leave them until they're happy with the way their books come out and they've got it uploaded and they have no more questions. So, but that's really all I'm doing is just, you know, basically showing them that you get this here, you get this here, you get this here, you have a question about how to fill this out, no problem. And I'm formatting it. So that's one package and it's, you know, it's confined. You're not going to end up paying and paying and paying. So with the writers, it's going to be up to the writer as they are developing their story. And I love to work with writers.

Writers are cool. Yeah. You know, they're just good people. They definitely are. I mean, there are people trying to help tell the story. And, you know, we learn so much in life, whether it's through novels or other, whatever it is, movies, TV, books. We learn through stories. And stories are an important aspect of, you know, they're basically the human being manual.

Because I didn't get one. Did you? No. Mine got lost in the mail. I didn't get one to help me raise my kid either. Yeah, they definitely don't give manuals for that they're just like have fun with that there you go just drops out and there it is and your way you go uh so um you know one of the things that i found in writing is having

accountability person or group is so important yeah because I tried to write a book for, what was it, 10, 13 years. And until I sat down and had a group with accountability and started out with like, okay, we're going to write an hour a day. Everyone's going to write an hour a day. And then we're going to put it up on a sheet and say, okay, we did our hour. And then whoever doesn't write that hour after the end of the week gets, I don't know, shamed and thrown into a den of wolves or something. I don't know, something like that, right?

Or has to buy everyone coffee. I don't know. We kind of talked about some punishments, but we never really did them. But having that accountability that people were like, hey, man, did you write your hour today? Did you do your – and really made all the difference in the world, made all the difference in the world. And so having a coach like you or an accountability person who, you know, you've got to be like, hey, man, I know they're going to call me, so I've got to do my thing and let's close off everything

and sit down and focus on, you know, typing and getting the spoken word out there. And it's a bit like an elephant writing a book. I mean, you just got to eat it one bite at a time. Exactly. You got to eat it one bite at a time. It's a couple pages. But being in the habit, too, of writing on a consistent basis

and then having somebody going, Are you writing? Are you doing that consistently? That's really the key because you just wake up one day and you're like, holy crap, there's a book there. Yeah, I try to make a schedule and I say, you know, given what the rest of my life looks like, I want to write 5,000 words a week, say, or 700, 500 words a week. That doesn't mean I have to write every day,

but I have to get to that number by the end of the week. That doesn't mean I have to write every day, but I have to get to that number by the end of the week. And I try to write in the morning because by the time the afternoon comes around, everything has sort of come across my plate and I'll get to the writing, I'll get to the writing and I don't get to the writing. And so it's best for me if I get downstairs and I have my breakfast and feed the cat and I start writing. And then if I can do that for an hour and a half, two hours every day, then I can bang it out and it gets written. And I have an accountability partner also. And I think it's a great thing.

And we keep each other accountable. And there's something really exciting about being able to say, yeah, I accomplished this, this, and this this week. Because I have a tendency, you know, without that, I have a tendency to forget about everything I did do and just focus on what I didn't get to. And that's not productive, you know. And she'll remind me, but you were going to do this, did you? Yes, I did that. Oh, and I did that, and I did that. And I was like, yeah, I guess it was a pretty good week. It gives you a feeling.

I think why it really succeeds, it gives you a feeling of being on a team, even though it's kind of a solo project. It's kind of a team sport. And so having that, you get that little raw, hey, you wrote for an hour, you wrote 5,000 words, good for you, and you got it. And then if you

didn't, you get the whole... No, we don't do that to each other. That's good. We're very encouraging. As a coach, I'm very encouraging. What got in the way? What can you do about that next time? It's not about shaming people as a coach. It's about

helping them meet their challenges. I want to be a coach so I can shame people for not writing. I'm going to be a shaming coach. You might not have a lot of clients after all. I don't know. I think I'm specifically just going to be a shaming coach, just in anything.

It's like whatever you want me to call and beat you over the head with because you didn't do it, that's what I'm going to do. I probably won't have any clients, huh? There's probably some St. Amascus who will pay for that. I don't know. That's an OnlyFans channel probably. Anyway, what else do we need to know about your coaching and what you do with the indie book publishing? So when I work with physicians or anybody in, basically anybody in the corporate world or who's just not feeling satisfied or, have a tendency to identify ourselves by what we do. And so if what we're doing is not fulfilling us at that particular period of our life,

it makes us feel really bad. So doctors in particular, who are you? I'm a doctor. Okay, but who else are you?, who are you? I'm a doctor. Okay, but who else are you? What else are you? And to start to look at it, and it's not just strictly for doctors, but to start to realize and acknowledge all the other roles in life that we play that are really exciting. And then when that one role, let's say being a physician these days,

is not really meeting our expectations that it had before, but there's so many other things in our life that are working well, it makes it a little easier to reframe that and to just say, okay, well, this part's not going so well, but I can't wait to get off and cook with my son or something like that because whatever it is that you do, it could be a tree hugger or a cat rescuer or whatever it is, but it's really important that we have other aspects of our lives that we express ourselves in.

Yeah, it's definitely awesome. And you know what? Being an author is cool. Like, I don't know. I think because it's so hard and people get it and there's so many people that try and fail. I mean, I tried for a long time. And, man, when you become an author, wow, it's like a badge of honor, man. Like people are like, you're an author?

Like you pulled that off? Do you know what's funny? When people used to hear I was a doctor, it's like, wow, you're an author like you pulled that off do you know it's funny when i used to when people used to hear i was a doctor it's like wow you're a doctor now nobody cares about that but oh you're an author i go up to people i go up to doctors of parties and say does this look infected just to piss them off um anyway that's that's my favorite type of guest yeah i do that just hey hey do you do you uh uh what does getting green look like uh you know something that no i don't so fun is fun uh and uh you made this your personal mission which is pretty freaking awesome do you help writers that was the question i had do you help writers for just novels, or do you help them with business books, nonfiction writing?

So I can do a lot of things. One thing I find that the program I use is not good at is doing workbooks, if somebody wants to have spaces for writing out things in the book. But I mean, other than that, you know, doing, you know, picture books, cookbooks, you know, how to books, you know, there's a lot of, of self help books. And, you know, I'm helping people to organize their thoughts and, and to, you know, put them in an appropriate outline so that they can start writing it. So it's not just fiction. Fiction is my favorite, but yeah, we can work on. There's so many times when

writing a book makes whatever it is that you're doing seem more credible. You can use that as part of your advertising campaign. There you go. When I was living down by the river, I wrote a book on living down by the river and people found I was more credible than anything.

I can still see Chris Farley, SNL jokes. Somebody should do a book in that voice of his. I went down by the river. Yeah. Well, they did a song kind of like that. Did they? I don't know. It sounds like something somebody sang sometimes.

I should write a success how-to book, like, How to Achieve Living Down by the River, 100 Ways to Realize the Loss of All Your Dreams. But you know what? I bet there are survival handbooks out there for living by the river, living off the grid, you know, living without electricity and fishing. How do you fish for which fish are good and which fish are bad? So, I mean, there's always so much you can get into. And that's the thing that we don't always look at.

We tend to sort of see the global picture, but when we start to look at the details, there's a lot that can be written. And the same when you're writing a fiction and you start to notice, what did the person look like? Why did they feel this way? Why are they acting that way? What motivates them to me? That's like the, the, the most fun part is creating the characters and seeing, you know,

what makes them behave the way they do, because it gives me insight into just, you know, human beings in general. Yeah. There was somebody who sent me a podcast. I was looking over to my left screen to see if I could pull it up really quick. Somebody sent me a podcast that was really obscure in the topic. And I don't even remember what it was, but it was, I wish I could pull it up real quick. And I think it had something to do with physicians and stuff, but it was a really obscure podcast where I'm just like, how many episodes can you do on that? Like, but you know, there's a flame for everybody. Like back in the eighties and nins, there was a magazine for everybody.

Now there's a podcast for everybody and a book for everybody. And we get hundreds of pitches on the show. And sometimes I'm just kind of like, well, that's interesting. But, yeah, no. So, you know, it's whatever. But it's a big world. There's lots of people that are interested in lots of stuff. But it's great to tell your story and get your message out.

What's the best way people can reach out to you and find out more about your services and how to engage with you on that if they can? So they can find me on my website, deborahblaine.com or veryindypress.com. There are, on the coaching pages, there's a place you can book a free, like a discovery call. Or you can email me. My email is there. You can, so DebraBlainMD at Gmail is an easy one to remember. I think there's a different one on the website, but don't worry about that.

Either one is fine. They both get to my inbox. And if you want to find out about my books, they're all on my website also. I'd like to ask if anybody does buy this book and likes it. If you don't like it, don't do this. If you like it, when it was transferred from the old

they linked the books, the old Code Blue to the new Code Blue and they lost my reviews. The first page of reviews came over and all the rest are gone and i'm a little heartbroken over that so um this was amazon so if if you like it if you read it and you like it please write a review on amazon now if you read it and you don't like it please don't write a review just like you know reach out to me i'll see if i can fix it for the

next edition. Yeah, don't write bad reviews, people. That's what we always say. We always tell people, you know, write a five-star review in the podcast. Do that. Yeah. Don't write anything less. Yeah, I mean, four stars is not, you know, when we do these surveys in medicine, it's it would be like, you know, only a five

gives you points. A four gives you nothing and anything lower than that is a minus, you know? So it's like it's not, yeah. I won't review someone if I don't like the service I received or the product. I just won't review it because I just don't want to do that to anybody. But I try to give positive reviews. Yeah. So go review the books, people.

We really appreciate it. Well, it's been wonderful to have you on the show, Debra. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. There you go. You got a great sense of humor. Well, that's what they pay me the $5 for, I mentioned earlier. So I get some drumsticks with some chicken or something, and they're very free pop. But then I have to leave because they're like, get out of here.

So give us your dot coms, wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs. Let's get that plug in. So this is the one I just gave, DeborahBlaine.com, D-E-B-R-A-B-L-A-I-N-E. It's the repetition that sinks it in. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm learning a lot about marketing. So DeborahBlaine.com, D-E-B-R-A-B-L-A-I-N-E.com.

There you go. There you go. There you go. And you can go to the different pages through the menu, and you'll find the very Indie Press right there. There you go. Order up her book, folks, wherever fine books are sold. Beyond the Pillars of Salt is the latest one, August 31st, 2022. Order all three and write some great reviews for them as well.

Thanks, Ron, for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com. See everything we're doing and reading over there. That's always a fun thing. LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, all those great... Well, I don't know about Twitter. We're on Twitter. I'm not worried. I'm not worrying anything about that. I'm just watching a billion dollars, billionaire billion billion dollars go up in flames and just watching the plane.

Some people got nothing better to do with their money. I wish I had that kind of money. I know, right? If I had it, I'd share it with you. We could go buy stuff and just burn it down to the ground. But I don't know.

Maybe he needs the write-offs. Maybe we go take a trip to the moon. Might as well. Maybe we should send him. Alright, well, thanks for tuning in, everyone. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.