Summary: Everyone on the podcast had some awesome news to report this week… and the reason you should care is because it was our interaction with each other, in part, that made the good news possible. We're a mastermind group of three writers -- a mastermind group that broadcasts its meetings publicly -- and the information-sharing and accountability we all share is a lot of the reason behind how seriously we take our craft and our writing businesses, and hence the results we get. Sean and Dave sign with Amazon's publishing arm … but don't worry, because they're not selling out self-publishing. Far from it, actually. Because they're Sean and Dave, they're not deciding between self-publishing at all. They're simply adding a project. Amazon called them up and said, "Hey, you want to write a serial for our serials program that we'll own and get behind and push for you and make you popular?" and they were like, "Sure! We'll just add that to the fifty books each week we're already writing!" Oh, but that's not all. They're actually doing TWO serials with Amazon… Z2134, which was previously self-published, and a new serial called Monstrous. You can get Z2134 for pre-sale right now. You can read Sean's official announcement here… and of course we go into all of the legally-disclosable details on the show. Johnny took an idea from conception to a finished book in 29 days On Tuesday, I (Johnny) released my second book, a horror/humor novella called Fat Vampire. And that's awesome, and I hope you go check it out, but the bigger story is that thanks to my "masterminding" with Sean and Dave and my seeing how they work, I was able to get the idea (which came out of a hilarious discussion on Better Off Undead episode #6, write the book, have the cover made, and release the thing all in less than a month. I actually wrote up my entire process in a blog post: From Idea to Publication on Kindle in 29 Days. The Better Off Undead horror (um… really? It's about horror?) podcast is now threatening to kick SPP's ass Oddly, the podcast we mentioned that we were starting way back in SPP episode #15 in order to better connect with people who might like of our type of writing is now as popular as this podcast. We talk about that a bit… the oddly useful experiment that is the Better Off Undead podcast. So yeah. We're glad we did that. We took voicemail questions We were way behind on answering questions that people have submitted via that nice big phone number on our homepage, so we caught up on them a bit. We got through three of them, with three left for next week. Hey, some progress! To view the video version of this episode, go to: Self Publishing Podcast #24 - The Importance of a Writers' Mastermind
