You know what I always wanted to be, ever since I was a kid? A storyteller. Not just a writer, but a teller of stories.

At no point did I want to be a blogger. At no point did I want to teach or sell knowledge. At no point did I want to be an “authority” in anything. I’m entrepreneurial by nature, but that has much more to do with my desire for freedom and choice than it does with my wanting to build a business for the business’s sake … so you never would have caught me, growing up, talking about the big business I’d one day own. I just didn’t care that much.

The business was always a means to an end. Same for blogging, teaching, authority-making, entrepreneurism, and so on. I was in no way opposed to any of that, but it definitely wasn’t what was frontmost in my heart. I had bills to pay and a family to feed, and up until recently “telling stories” wasn’t a viable or reliable way to do those things. My dad said (affectionately, at least) that I was “whoring my talent” to do the things I did before I told stories for a living … but hey, a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do to make it in the world.

And admittedly? The Self-Publishing Podcast, for me, began as a means to an end. I liked speaking to an audience, but didn’t want to SPEAK TO AN AUDIENCE just because it was neat in and of itself. Sean and Dave knew how to make fiction work as a career, and I wanted to learn more. That was why I pushed the guys to start SPP. We never figured the Self-Publishing Podcast or anything that came from it would make us any money. For all of us, it was about masterminding with each other, meeting people who knew more than we did, and reminding ourselves, every single week, that we were writers.

Along the way, something changed.