So this past week I had been invited by the Story Coach I had interacted and used their services with last calendar year to an Expo on Tuesday, the 5th of May to actually discuss my novelette. The photo above is courtesy of the office that hosted the event, Guidespring.
I had wrote the novelette, Beneath Stillwaters Bodies Lie, as a testament to my love interest I had at my old retail job; and also with the new muse in my life that carried me into Epilogue of the after the Climax where the antagonist and protagonist have a heated verbal altercation. The novelette is a fairly short read in one sitting of around 1 hour approximately, given it's length is around 124 pages. There was other authors as well there at the Expo and we all carried loosely the theme of grief and trauma to a varying degree. Most of them were non-fiction peices inspired by real life events or people that have impacted their life personally.
We also got asked questions, one I wanted to dive into more that I didn't step into a lot in the panel was taking the first step of the creative journey to writing. I find it similar to editing videos, sometimes you have ideas that aren't worth much when you start the process and then you pick it up at a later date. Or you do what I did, write for a while, lose interest, get inspired by another idea and focus on that. I worked through two previous ideas at writing a story before I settled on the one now publicly available as I had to find something that hooked me.
I had used the analogy a little bit earlier of YouTube Growth without givinhg it away as salesman-esque advice. The YouTube platform may never see the surface of what goes into a video from the creators standpoint. It takes time, purpose, inspiration, and effort to do what I did with that book, even blog posts on here, also making videos like I do on YouTube.
A lot of YouTubers also post videos that initially get no traction until they are established on the Platform. I have ran the Enneagram Talk Channel since around February 8th, of 2025. I have aroud 106 published videos, shorts, and lives on the channel since it's creation. I have done some videos I created with the intentions similar to my novelette, with the intention of putting my creativity "on the record", and leads to no immediate payoff.
I have also created videos with the intention of sharing knowledge that I know others may have an interest in, for example just diving into what Types look like under stressful situations or how each Type may react to things like: job loss, death, social ghosting experiences. I'm only recently starting to physically see, for myself, that I'm gaining trust from the Platform and the Audience. I don't expect virality anymore since I've tasted it in Shorts via the View Count in my Analytics but also have now focused on just sharing experiences.
I also didn't expect my writing to actually lead me to selling any in person and to my surprise it did lead to me getting a couple of in-house sales, each of the books sold that night were signed by myself. I feel very successful from the days events and I'm glad that each of us had support not only from friends but also from eachother at the Expo.
I have plans down the road to sharing my novelette on the 4thWall Merch page, given that my book had been published through the Story Coach's Publisher and it is housed at the Guidespring Office I'll have to work in tandem with them to get books for myself to ship out of my house and wait on publishing company as well to ship to them. Thank you for reading this and if getting a book actually interests you please let me know. As of right now we can discuss details and the like through the e-mail address, brandedenneagram9142@gmail.com.
Eventually that will probably be adjusted if the platform has a page selling it as of writing this I have to dive into it more on the platform and seeing how limited merch is different from my usual merch that I don't house and the shipper deals with the stock and sales out and I just get some of the profit from the merchandise.