Mike Gold, Author of Creating a Wordle Game in React and TypeScript

The transcript below is unedited output from OpenAI Whisper.

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Hi, I’m Len Epp from Leanpub and in this episode of the FrontMatter podcast, I’ll be interviewing Mike Gold. Based in Austin, Mike has been developing software for over 20 years and worked as a consultant in the banking, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and military industries. He has also written over 200 articles on.NET and C-Sharp technology, which you can find on csharpcorner.com. You can follow him on Twitter at msgold2011 and find him on LinkedIn at mikegoldaustin. Mike is the author of the Leanpub book, Creating a Wordle Game and React in TypeScript. Mike wrote the book to help a developer through the process of building a React app in order to familiarize the developer with some of the important features of React in TypeScript in a fun and easy to follow experience. The book goes step by step through some of the widely used concepts in React. In this interview, we’re going to talk about Mike’s background and career, professional interests, and his book. So thank you very much, Mike, for being on the FrontMatter podcast. Thanks for having me, Len. Appreciate it. I always like to start these interviews by asking people for their origin stories. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about where you grew up and how you got into computers and technology. Sure. I was talking to you earlier about Simon Brown. It was funny. I was listening to him, and his origin story sounded like my origin story. And then I remember he said, oh, he’s from Jersey. I said, oh, I’m also from Jersey. But then I realized he meant Jersey near London, and I meant Jersey Piscataway, like Jersey. Anyway, so yeah, my origin story. I started on an Apple II computer when I was young. My dad got me one, and I learned on that. And I remember listening to Simon Brown stories, typing in programs and games from magazines. I did the same thing. Early on with computers, I also tried writing my own games. Back then, it was BASIC. And later, it was other languages. But so I started with that. I also took a high school computer course. I remember writing a high school adventure game. That was one of my first games where you would walk through the school and collect various school artifacts for that class. So later on, I, of course, went into engineering. I was in electrical engineering all the way to the master’s program. And then I went out and got a job. And at that time, jobs were hard to come by. I mean, to be honest with you, I couldn’t get a jobs undergrad because it was so bad. That was like the 80s, like late 80s. And it was a hard time for engineers to pick up jobs. But after my master’s, I managed to score a job with DuPont in doing MAC programming, which was an interesting learning experience for sure. But I did some MAC programming. It was a molecular biology. DuPont had a gene sequencing machine. And my job was to help write software that would help track the genes going through what’s called an electrophoresis gel. Basically, they zap a gel with 1200 volts, and it pushes DNA strands down to it. And they read the ends of those strands. And the larger strands are pulled down faster by gravity. So they get sequenced first. And in this way, you can actually sequence a gene in order. And I still use that technology today. And I got to be part of that, which was really cool. Later on, I moved to actually doing engineering work for building centrifuges, which was kind of neat. It was embedded system work. And it was programming different kinds of microcontrollers. And I helped. You could build another product just by changing the code slightly, which was my first foray into generating products quickly with code. You could just take a feature out of the software. And then that piece of hardware wouldn’t work. And you can have different upgrades. And so that’s what I did for a few years, helped build centrifuges or fix bugs in centrifuges. After that, I decided it’s time to break out on my own. So I had this idea for building a tool for state diagrams. And I built this tool. At the time, I built it in Visual C++, Microsoft technology. And it allowed you to draw these state diagrams that would generate code from them. And after that, I started reading about UML. I know Simon Brown talked about it in his interview a lot. And I became very immersed in UML, very interested in it because I realized it was a way to model software, architect software, without writing code and sort of giving a picture version of the design. And a picture is a thousand words, even with software. So it was very useful. And I hooked up with a guy named Richard Felsinger, who was a trainer. And we worked together. I would sell my software. He’d use it in his training classes. And eventually, I took it further. I built a whole UML tool that drew everything from class eight and other kinds of diagrams and sequence diagrams. And then I started heavily marketing it through magazines like Dr. Dobb. And eventually, my sister and brother-in-law joined the business. And it became a full business. We were selling this product for a while until I think it was around the time that I heard of a tool called Rational Rose. But they were the leaders in that space. They invented UML. They also had the tool that they sold. But they end up selling to IBM. And soon after that, the market for UML tools sort of died. There’s no real great explanation. I think people started these rapid frameworks. They felt they didn’t really need architecture as much. But it was a fun adventure. The tool did everything from generate code to reverse engineer code in six languages. It was a lot of fun writing that tool. And after that, I decided it’s time to go back to work, to go into consulting. And that’s what I’ve been doing since. I’ve been heavily consulting mostly in the Microsoft technology space. In fact, I was a Microsoft MVP for a while because I’ve written articles on C Sharp Corner, many, many articles on many topics of various technologies in Microsoft, as well as some fun games. One of my fun games was I recreated Space Invaders. And when I say recreated, I mean, I recreated it completely. All the graphics, the sounds. I found a site to help me do that. And I wrote an article on that. And at the time, those articles were doing well. I mean, thousands of people have read them. And it felt good that people really enjoyed those articles. And so I kept writing them. But then I stopped writing after C Sharp Corner a while and concentrated more on getting consulting off the ground. And that’s mostly my story. Thanks very much for sharing that. That’s really great. For anyone who’s interested, check out Mike’s experience on LinkedIn and you’ll see just how many I think that there’s like sort of 36 entries or something like that, some of them overlapping. And it’s just this really interesting, diverse array of experiences and things you’ve worked on. I’m really curious, actually. So I saw that you studied electrical engineering at Cornell. And I think a lot of people listening now might be like, how could it possibly have been hard to get a job as an engineer? Because nowadays, of course, there’s a sort of notorious kind of battle for talent and stuff like that. And a lot of people think, oh, well, there’s been various recessions and things like that. Was that what was going on at the time? That’s exactly what was happening. There was a recession. It was only a short period. But at the time coming out of school, I had trouble. I went through many interviews and didn’t get a job. And there was always these lulls in the job market at certain times. And that was one of them. And later on, after the dot com busts, I was in Manhattan, I think, at the time. And it was hard to get a job at that point as well. Yeah, there are these various sort of punctuation points, as it were. Right. You get these dips. But they don’t usually last long in the technology field. It doesn’t seem like it. There’s just so much opportunity in technology that it bounces back in one area or another. Yeah, but it is very frustrating to be in the kind of cohort of, if you went to university, cohort of graduates when you sort of graduate in that moment. And you’re like, why me? Yeah, there’s definitely those questions in my mind, for sure. And so you studied electrical engineering, but you ended up being a programmer in a lot of your work anyway. I mean, you said your dad bought you the Apple II. And so you were more or less self-taught in programming? Yeah, I would say a lot of it. I was self-taught. I mean, I did take some university classes. Most of my university classes were electrical engineering, and my master’s was also electrical. But I did take some computer science classes. And some more memorable ones are data structures, which even to this day, I find a good solid foundation for understanding how to use those structures in programming. And another was, I took one other computer course. I didn’t take a whole array of them, but I took assembly language programming, which was kind of fun. I remember the final was you had to write the game of life in assembly, and we all tried to get the fastest score. And some guy from France got it down to like six seconds or some ridiculously, or six microseconds or whatever it was at the time. That’s amazing. That actually gives me the opportunity to ask a version of a question that I ask many times on this podcast in the past, which is, if you were starting out now in 2022, almost, I mean, this will probably come out in 2023. But if you were starting out now as sort of like, you know, sort of young person with the intention of having a career in technology and programming, would you do a full university degree? You know, I heard you ask that question, Simon. That’s a good question. I think I probably still would. And I think, let me give the reason. A degree, I mean, and I don’t agree with the logic behind this, but a degree in a lot of companies or places they look for, that’s like a ticket. Like if you get your degree, then if you, you know, go through and get the whole thing, they look for that. The HR departments in large companies, I think they even weed out that, which is ridiculous because if you’re qualified, like I, as a hiring manager, I would, if someone had the skills and talking to them, they knew what they were doing, I wouldn’t care. But I think there are policies in place that make it harder if you don’t complete those degrees. So I think I’m happy that I did, and I didn’t drop out and, you know, start my entrepreneurship, whatever, two years in. I’m glad I finished what I started. So, because there was still opportunity even after that to, there’s always opportunities to try out things. Yeah, it’s sort of tricky, I don’t know, environment when it comes to kind of getting hired right in so many sort of ways. And especially, and it’s, you know, especially daunting for the sort of recent graduate and things like that. But, you know, we now live in the age where there’s kind of algorithms that look at applications and they, you know, they might. They don’t even make it to the person with, you know, at that point, which is sad. And they might, I mean, I know I looked at some of the, in a former life, I was an investment banker and I remember applying to some of the banks that you worked for. And, you know, they’d be like, there was a set of East Coast private schools, a specific set of them that you would like, I mean, in high schools that you could indicate that you’d attended in your application. And it was like, wow, what a lesson in like, you know, how these algorithms sort of weed things out or bring things to the top. But that being said, for anyone listening who’s sort of like, you know, facing this choice or maybe didn’t go to university, I mean, tons of people that I’ve interviewed on the podcast as well are like, you know, you don’t need to go to university at all. I’m a hiring manager. And, you know, like for people who sort of do hiring where it’s not sort of passed through an algorithm and even sometimes when it is, it actually doesn’t always matter. It’s not always the case. That’s true. Especially the smaller companies where you’re actually talking to the human who’s going to hire you. It’s a different story. I think, you know, people that are technologists, we look for people that really have the experience in doing certain things and not so much that degree doesn’t matter as much. Yeah. And I think, and in the age of kind of GitHub and, you know, open source and stuff like that, if you’ve, if you’ve done a bunch of, I mean, one of the sort of, the main things you get hired, like do a bunch of projects, do them in public, deliver something. And that’s like, you know, that’s just a really great way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And right. And right. For example, if you can, that’s true. Actually writing is certainly, I know when I, in my, in the early days when I was writing for C sharp corner, it definitely got the attention of some hiring managers and they would say, Oh, I read your article on the oscilloscope in GDI plus or, you know, which I always sound kind of cool. So yeah, it’s, that’s just on that note, before we go on to talk about your book, you know, lean pub used to be bootstraps. So we had, we had consulting clients and one of the, our most lucrative clients, you know, found us by pirating my co-founder Peter’s book or books. Yeah. And sort of, you know, sort of pirated, read them and was like, wow, I really want to work with you. But having, having books out there, even if, even if they’re free in one way or another, there’s still an advertisement, right? There’s still an advertisement. Exactly. You know, having, having stuff out there is really great. And sort of speaking of having stuff out there. So you’ve got this great, great fun world book. Oh yeah. Yeah. I have, I have it right here actually. It’s a, yeah. Oh, great. You can’t see it backwards there. No, no, no. I I’m seeing it. I’m seeing it. Oh, you’re actually seeing it for us. I’m seeing it back. So yeah, I have the creating a world game and reacting type script. So yeah, I was wondering if you could talk about the, the origin story of that book and, and the, I, well, you know, my sister and I and my wife and my son, we have this thread where we all play wordle and I thought, you know, this would be a really, this is be a really cool game to, to, you know, write a book or be actually cool to write the application. And I thought, you know, what would be even more fun is to write a tutorial that teach people the sort of patterns and react using TypeScript to create something fun. And you know and I actually did it, wrote this book for fun, you know, is it, it’s like, okay, let’s, let’s get back into it. Cause I used to do this for C sharp corner quite a bit and say, well, lean pub does books. Why don’t I try writing and even, and it’s funny because this book, I don’t know if I told you this, but this book got the attention of a press and they, they contacted me on, they saw it on lean pub. They wanted to publish it, but they wanted to do, they want to get to help me get a co-author and they wanted to juice up the pages. And I thought, I just kind of did this for fun and I want to get it out there. So I told them, no, we’re, we’re just going to sell it. We’re going to self-publish it and do it ourselves. So, and I have worked with a press in the past, but you know, this was an opportunity to self-publish again and interesting story when I was with C sharp corner. And I think this was even before lean pub existed. We, we did a self-published book through my company, micro gold, through people all over the world, each writing a chapter and we publish it. I got it in Barnes and Noble. I went through the whole process, Baker and Taylor, and at the time was Ingram and in getting and learning how to do that and distribute the book. The only problem it turned out that the distributor was a crook and they stole it. It was, it was really a bad, it’s a bad story, but none of our authors got paid because this person ran off. We couldn’t find her. I had talked to other publishers that were in her catalog and you know, so lesson learned that you got to make sure you’re with a reputable publisher. And, but anyway, the book was still fun and it still ended up in Barnes and Noble and the rest are sitting in my garage, but you know, at one point we did have a publicist who pushed them out. So, and that book was called visual C sharp. So, so that was my first foray into self-publishing, but I thought, Hey, let’s do it again with lean pubs. Got this great platform. You know, you can, you can actually write, you write your entire book and, and publish it, you know, and look and see the PDF right away. And that’s, that’s really cool. And so that’s got started. And then, you know, you guys let me into your Amazon program, which now, now it’s on Amazon. These guys, I got to be, I got to tell you, they got this book out in a week. I’m not lying. Lean pub got this book on Amazon, published ISP and everything in record time. I was, I was thrilled. And it’s so it’s, it’s out there. And anyway more about the book. So book isn’t, isn’t a very long book, but it is a tutorial. And it, it, if you are familiar with react it’s a good, it’s a good fun thing to go through and, and you know, the source code’s available to there’s a link in the book to, to, to guide you through that as well. Yeah, it’s really great. It’s been really fun. And there’s, there’s a, there’s a section in there, but so for those, maybe, maybe for those, I mean, I’m pretty sure everyone will know what Wordle is, but Wordle is kind of a mastermind style game for, for guessing a word. Right. And so there’s sort of, I think, is it six or I just did today’s, but is it six or five attempts that you get? Yeah, you get, you get six attempts. Six attempts. And so it’s basically, basically what you’ll see is if you go to, if you go to the New York times bought it and it was, it was really funny. Like I think the creator created it to sort of like as something of fun sort of gift for his wife and then got bought for some kind of seven figure, low seven figure amount. And then because it became so popular, but basically you’ll see like six rows of five boxes and you, you try and guess a word. And then, you know, it’ll show you if, if the letter is in, is the right, is a letter that is included in the word. And then I think it’s sort of this orange or something like that. And then it’s green if it’s the correct letter in the correct spot. And then there’s, there’s sort of different settings. Like there’s a hard setting where if, if you guessed a letter, you have to use it in the next guess. And if it’s, you know, if it’s green and you guessed it in the same place, you have to guess it in the same place and stuff like that. Yeah. It’s like I’ve ever played mastermind. That was an old game that was put out by, I think it was Parker brothers or, um, and it’s, it’s a long, it’s exactly the same kind of thing, except this guy kind of combined it with, uh, you know, letters instead of colors. And, and, um, I mean, it’s definitely a great idea and, uh, to, to, to, you know, to expand that mastermind concept and, and, and create almost like this, uh, puzzle, uh, that that’s, that’s, that gives you similar clues and, and, and, uh, you know, you can easily create those puzzles. So do you have a go-to first word, a go-to first word? Yeah. Oh yes, I do actually. Uh, um, so my son actually had a go-to first word is soleil, which isn’t, I’ve, I’ve never heard this word S A L E T, but apparently it’s a word. I think it’s some 17th century French, something or other. I don’t know, but apparently it’s the best word to pick. I actually, my go-to first word is slate, which is the same letters, um, but it’s slightly different. And, um, that that’s the word I usually pick, uh, unless I’m feeling, uh, feeling different. I’ll sometimes pick words like train, you know, um, those are, those are my two first go-to. And if I don’t get it with slate, I usually, if slate doesn’t show any letters, I think I go to house or something like that, or, or if it shows just the E or something. Yeah, that’s funny. I use, um, my first word is just, just kind of for fun is Thane, which is like a Viking word for Lord basically. Um, uh, T H A N E. And, uh, so you get, you know, T H and E. Yeah. Then you got the most important vowels there. So are the most frequent vowels. So yeah. And you get the T H nothing shows up then I use proud. So you get an R O and U in there as well. Right. So knocks out most of the vowels. That that’s, that’s pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever, I think that’s a good strategy. I think it is like, if you try to knock out the vowels first, like if you can, that’s, that’s my, you ever got it on the second try. Yes. And, and, and if you get on the second try, it’s just pure luck, but it’s, but, uh, yeah, I have never just one though. Never mine read the thing. Yeah. I, I, the, the most, the most proud I’ve ever been was I got none on the first one, none on the second one. And it’s like when I done Thane and proud and it’s like, wow, what, what could be left? And then I got it perfectly on the third try. Yeah. Like a word, like, you know, I don’t know for some word that you would never think of vowels, but yeah. But it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s just such a great idea because he feel, you feel so like satisfied when you get it, when you get it that way. Um, yes. And they make it, if you ever played the New York times version, they make it, you know, really fun where they, you know, they say splendid. If you got it, you know, make you feel good about actually, I’m just, just, just curious talking, just talking about word now. Um, is that what your book is partly about? But, um, at the time when it was first created before it got acquired, you could actually download the full word list. Um, yes. And I, and I, I think there’s this, you can, you can find it online. I think if you, if you get, uh, you know, my link will have, um, in the book has, uh, links to the word list and you can, you know, use the entire word, a word list, which is not exactly the same as you’d think. It’s not all only five letter words. Like they don’t do like plurals in the word list. So the, that you won’t find, um, uh, trying to think of a word like bills or something, you won’t find those in the word list. So the, I think the list is somewhere around 2000. The official list is something like 2000 unique words. Yeah. It’s a, it’s, it’s super fun actually to sort of, I’ve, I’ve downloaded it at that time when it sort of became popular, just to look at it and it was neat to sort of scrolling through today’s word. So I’m not giving, this is no, no spoiler for a while, but today’s word, uh, was usual. Yes. That was hard. I struggled with it today. Yeah. It’s so, it’s so interesting that you can, you know, I just, one thing I love about the game is that you can be there like, huh? Like, I know this is probably an ordinary word that I use all the time, but like, you know, I was stuck with like a L at the end and then I was saying what could that be? Yeah. I got stuck the same way. I was trying comment. I had an S A L somewhere and I still couldn’t get it. Right. Um, it was, that was, that was a tricky one. Yeah. I had the S as well. It wasn’t your usual words. Exactly. Uh, and so, um, but you, you already, and so just going on to talk about your, um, experience writing. So how did you actually get into writing your, your, your posts for C sharp? Yeah. When I, when I was working, uh, closely with C sharp corner, I, I, you know, I was back and forth with Mahesh. I just put a post up for fun. I think it was, I can’t remember what my first post was. It might, it was something graphic related, I think. And then, uh, Mahesh, who was the owner of the site or probably still is, uh, he, he sent it back to me and he encouraged me to write more. And then I really found that I enjoyed it and I enjoyed getting feedback. And, um, so I just kept writing and, and, uh, and I broached many, many topics. It’s fun to, it was fun to just explore, not only explore Microsoft’s technology and the.net framework, but, you know, I explored things like artificial intelligence. I wrote a few articles on genetic algorithms and some probabilistic algorithms. And, uh, so you could, the nice thing C sharp core, you can write about just about anything you want to do. So I, uh, you know, I went across, even wrote some articles on, on hardware where, you know, I’m, I’m, I wrote a, a solar panel, um, measure that grafts, you know, the, the daylight and it just fun things like that. And, uh, I would get feedback from some of the, because they were popular articles, I would get feedback from some of the, some of the hardware people, a guy named Al Williams, who’s a big writer for, um, electronic magazines. And I, you know, I wrote a review for, uh, Robert Martin, uh, on his book, clean code. And because of his exposure, he thanked me. So it was kind of cool, you know, cause they really gave me access to some of the leaders in the field, uh, and talking to them. So, yeah, it’s one of, it’s, um, uh, one of the things that, you know, if you can get a bit of traction and a bit of attention, um, you know, you know, one of the reasons, you know, you end up writing sort of hundreds of articles is because people are paying attention to them and you get feedback and they like it. And it’s one of the, one of the great rewards for writing and publishing. Did you, did you, I’m just curious because you wrote so many, did you do like one a week? Did you have a schedule or something like that? I didn’t really have a set schedule, but I tried to write like at least one every two weeks. And I actually dropped off, um, after a few years, I wasn’t writing nearly as often. Um, because I think most of my time was spent, uh, doing consulting at that point, but for a while I was writing a lot of them, quite a few actually. So I really, I remember how much I enjoyed it. So that’s why I came back and did this book and there’ll probably be more to come. Yeah. So you eventually alighted upon lean pub. Um, yes. And what, what writing mode did you use? Actually? I feel bad that I didn’t double check that, which, which writing mode as, as in like, uh, the markdown or no, like on, on lean pub. So we have, um, yeah, we have like the, the browser and then we have Dropbox and get hub and, oh, um, uh, my, actually I, I wrote it. You mean, how did I write it or I’ll let me, I’ll just, I’ll just check right now. Um, uh, I’m just asking the question badly. Oh, okay. So you, you, um, I found it right now. So yeah, you, you chose our in browser writing mode. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What I did was, and this I recommend to anybody, I downloaded a tool called visual code. I actually didn’t download, I use it on my job and visual code has a plugin for markdown and I used that. And then, um, what I did was, um, I then pasted that markdown into, uh, into your web browser. Uh, that’s, that’s how I wrote, uh, wrote the book. Oh, that’s really interesting. I don’t know if I’ve ever, I mean, I’m sure, I’m sure that actually you, you probably not the first person to do that, but you’re the first person I’ve talked to, I think who did that. Uh, that’s yeah, it’s very useful because visual visual code really, it translates, they have a plugin that translates that markdown and you can see it side by side as you’re typing. And, um, you can also see the code, how that looks in the, in, in the, uh, um, and yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s the way I was able to check and see the images and see how it, you know, no, that’s really great. That’s really great. Um, and, um, you mentioned, so you mentioned, um, uh, that you, you got lean pub, got your book on Amazon. So, um, so for anyone listening, we’ve got this thing that we introduced recently called lean pub author services, um, with a rather grand title. Um, and basically this was in response to, you know, for many years actually, uh, you know, and I’ll, I’ll be asking you this question shortly, but, um, you know, the last question I always ask on these podcast interviews is if there’s one thing we could, there’s one thing you hated about lean pub that we were shouting at the screen all the time about that we could fix for you. If there was one feature we could build for you, what would you ask for? And often people ask for what I sort of came to call the magic button, which is like, can I just, I’ve written my book in one of lean pub’s writing modes. Can I just click a button and get a print book up on Amazon? And we sort of, sort of finally decided to offer, we sort of offered a version of that many moons ago, but we’ve now, we’re now offering it again. And the idea is if you’ve written your book on lean pub and you, if you’ve published it and it’s done, um, uh, then we’ve got a button you can click basically, and it, you know, it costs a few hundred bucks, but you know, then we’ll, we’ll sort of, we’ll correspond with you, but we’ll do everything for you to get your book in, in hardcover and paperback and, you know, Kindle, Kindle edition up on Amazon and be this sort of like, this is all stuff. Then we’re very explicit about this. This is all stuff that you could totally do on your own. Um, if you wanted to, but who, not everybody has to do that. A lot of people are like, you know, wow, for just like, you know, a few hundred bucks, you can, I can just like not think about it and it’ll be up there and you’ll take care of everything for me. And so you, and you were the very, and so thank you very much, Mike, very user you were the earliest of early adopters. Um, and we were, we were super interested in sort of like actually that how that would work out. Like, you know, when you signed up, we’re like, okay, like, let’s see. Um, and it worked great. It really worked out well. I mean, I can’t believe how quickly, as I said, how quickly, um, lean pub, uh, company got it up, uh, got the book up on Amazon in Kindle form with hardcover art and all this stuff that it would have taken me a month to do or months and full time. I mean, I, or whatever, I just wouldn’t have known what I was doing. So I was really thankful that they were able to offer that service. I think the next service you guys though need to offer is some kind of marketing program, I think, or even partner with a marketing company, but that, that would like complete your, because that’s the, I think the only thing that really publishing companies have, you know, that, that you don’t and yeah, that’s great. You know, there are part marketing firms out there, but I have a feeling that, uh, you know, it would be, that’s, that would be my only hot button is that, you know, I’m sure authors, once they write their book and wanting, you know, if they want to sell them, it’s, they need ways to do that. So you’ve, you’ve gone ahead and answered the question. Yeah. There’s one more thing we could build for you. What would you ask? You’re not, you’re not the first person to, to, to ask for that. Um, I can, I can try to go ahead and try and answer. So, um, the, the, the, the main answer is, um, when it comes to marketing, I mean, we’ve been doing this podcast for about 10 years and sort of, this has been the kind of our main kind of, how can we help market your book is like published podcast episodes and stuff like that. Just this year, we kind of got religion a little bit on like, we really need to be doing like, instead of just being coding book generation stuff, kind of nerds, we actually needed to sort of do more to, to get, to get, to get attention to authors and books and stuff like that. And, and, and play a little bit more of the role of the conventional publisher, right? Because the idea is, look, like a lot of people who are self publishers, they, they’re self published authors. They love writing. They love the subjects that they write about. And they’re like, but I’m not a marketer. And maybe I don’t even enjoy sell us self promotion. Right. And so the, the role that the sort of company plays is like to be the medium or the conduit. So it’s like, it’s the company that’s promoting you, not you promoting yourself. And that’s actually very different vibe. And so what we’ve done now is we’ve got these new initiatives. So we’re going to be doing these lean pub, what we call lean pub launch videos. So we’ve done three of them so far, which is like, we’re finally doing what everybody in the book publishing industry has been doing forever, which is book launch, book launches. But basically if you go to lean pub.com slash launch, you can fill out a form and apply if you’re a lean pub author, who’s, and we’re doing them not just for like publishing a book for the first time, but if you’re publishing a major new version, cause of course we do lean publishing. Right. And so if you’re publishing a major new version, you can do another launch. So you can have many launch videos for the same book. That’s awesome. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s super fun. And yeah. So if anyone’s listening, and you’re lean pub author, you know, please, please apply to do one of those. There’s one other thing. I, I know that there’s two other platforms. I think it’s Barnes and Noble and something called chaos, something I can’t remember that lean pub could offer, you know, I mean, because they’re growing this program to offer to some of these distributors. Oh yes. Yes. So, so, so we’ve started our lean pub author services with, with Amazon. We, we may offer distribution to other services in the future. Part of the problem there though, is like, kind of like there is Amazon is the easiest to work with. Oh yeah, no question. You know, and, and so it’s kind of like, and when you start, like, I mean, in the self publishing world, I don’t know if you read self publishing blogs and stuff like that, but there’s like the kind of like, there’s these terms of like putting all your eggs in one basket or going wide and going, going, we, we sort of do typically recommend going wide, which is publishing on lots of different platforms. But at the same time, there’s always this sort of cost benefit of like, you know, right. You know, all the overhead, is it really worth it to sort of be up? Right. Cause if Amazon sells 90% of the books, then the others don’t really matter. All the big publishers are on Amazon publishers as well. But we’re also going to be doing, you know, sort of explainer videos to get stuff out there. And, and you know, we’re actually going to be doing lean pub author videos. So someone, someone contacted us with like, Hey, here’s how I do coupons. And we’re like, Hey, we should have a playlist on YouTube of like, people can submit videos about like, oh, that’s a great idea. Yeah. And so, and so again, we’re, we’re, it’s not self promotion in the same way it normally would be right. It’s kind of like, Oh, now it’s, it’s, it’s a lean pub author video. So if you go to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash lean pub, you’ll see, I do a little, I’ve got a little intro there where I talk about the various kinds of series that we’ve got going, but that is what we’re doing to sort of offer sort of as in-house kind of marketing services to authors. And, um, but when it comes to, when it comes to offering kind of, and those are all free, when it comes to offering paid marketing, though, we may do something on that eventually. Um, there’s a couple of tricky elements to that though. One of which is, I mean, you mentioned getting, getting scammed and offering kind of paid marketing services is something that like not everyone who offers that to self-published authors is a scammer, but all scammers offer that. Yes. Um, so, so like when you, when you, you’ve got to be really careful and you’ve got, I mean, we’ve lean pub has a lot of goodwill cause we’ve built it up over the years and stuff like that. Oh yeah. But you’ve got, you’ve got to be, that’s why I’m thinking if you guys figure out a way to do it, people will trust you, right? Where the ones that are out there now are like call centers there. Oh yeah. I mean, I got, I got, I got kind of on a list once they called my parents, if you would believe it or not, multiple times. Yeah. Telling them, well, we want to publish a book by your son, you know? And, uh, it was, it’s gross. Um, uh, but, um, but, but yeah, no, no, no. That’s, that’s a really interesting suggestion. And we, we, we did sort of entertain the idea of, um, paid Facebook ads, for example. And, and then the principle would be the same, right? It’s like, I don’t want to have to learn about Facebook ads. I don’t want to have to learn about Twitter ads or whatever it is. You guys just take care of it. Here’s some money. And, uh, and actually one thing I should mention as well is that in addition to being, being able to just pay for our lean pub author services, you know, with a credit card, you can actually bid on them using unpaid royalties that you’ve already earned from your book. This is a feature that we have as well for anyone listening. So your book can actually become kind of self funding that way, which is, which is super, super interesting. Uh, we think, um, and, and kind of popular we, we, uh, with, with authors. Um, and also actually when it comes to marketing, we have our, um, I don’t know if you actually know about this, but we have a, we have weekly sales and monthly sales that I did see that. And I’m definitely considering doing some of that. Yeah. So you can, you can opt in for free by going to your, your, your book pricing page or your bundle or your course or your course track. And you can, you can then sort of set the discount amount that you did the maximum discount amount that you’ll allow us to do that gets you on the list. Oh, that’s, that’s totally free, but you can actually pay for sponsored spot that goes at the top of the newsletter. And, and, uh, and you can, and then you also get on the, we call the shelf, which is sort of a prominent display on our homepage, stuff like that. So we do offer that in our, um, our weekly sale reaches about 20,000 people and our monthly sale, I think ticked over 60,000. Um, okay. That’s a nice size list. Yeah. It’s a pretty, pretty good size list. We wish it were bigger and, but you know, they do, they do grow, um, not as much as we wish they would, but you know, that’s our job to sort of market that as well. But yeah, I know that’s thanks very much for that feedback. And that’s definitely something that like we’re getting these signals, you know, from, from people that like we want to do the writing, we want to do the thinking and we’re happy to do, do do videos and stuff like that. But we also want to pay you guys to do some, some paid marketing for us on various channels out there. So that’s definitely something that we’ll consider. Uh, well, uh, Mike, um, thank you very much for being on the front matter podcast and for being a lean pub author. And, um, and, uh, thank you very much again for being the sort of, you know, earliest of early adopters for our lean pub author services. It was my pleasure, Lynn. Thank you. And thanks for all lean pub is done really. Thanks very much. And as always, thanks to all of you for listening to this episode of the front matter podcast. If you’d like what you heard, please rate and review it wherever you found it. And if you’d like to be a lean pub author yourself, please check out our website at leanpub.com. Thanks.