Writing Faith Into Fiction Without Preaching: Josh Resinger – The Writing Coach Ep. 246

Kevin Johns: Josh, welcome to the show.

Josh Resinger: Hey, how’s it going?

Kevin Johns: So you’re a client of mine, but it’s interesting, because a lot of the clients I work with come to me very early in their writing careers, so I’m there along the journey of finishing a first book and starting to build that author career. But you came to me through Signal Boost, my marketing program, so you’re already an established author with multiple books out there. I’m looking forward to this interview to get to know the origin story of all the stuff I’m familiar with from working with you, because I wasn’t there alongside you as it was being written and built. So maybe take me back to the beginning. When did you know you were going to be an author?

Josh Resinger: That took place back in 2019. I grew up in a family of pastors. My dad was a pastor, my mom was a pastor’s wife, and her father was a pastor as well. So I come from a long line of pastors, and that’s what I always wanted to be growing up. I wanted to follow in the family footsteps.

The one thing that was unusual is that my dad was the senior pastor, and I wore a lot of hats. I was his youth pastor, his worship pastor, his college associate pastor, all of that. But the one hat I never wanted to wear was senior pastor. For some reason, it never appealed to me.

Then my dad was diagnosed with cancer, which he eventually beat, but it slowed him down, and he had to take a step back from that role. He wasn’t able to preach as much anymore, and when that happened, I lost the desire to keep preaching without him in the mix. That was always my dream and my goal. But I still had this desire to be a minister in some way. I just didn’t know what that looked like.

I don’t really know where it happened or what I was reading, but I was doing a Bible study one day, and it struck me that a lot of Jesus’s teachings were told through story. He told parables that weren’t necessarily based on real people or historical figures. They were made-up stories that held a deeper meaning. And I thought, “Wow, maybe this could be my ministry. I could write stories that hold a deeper meaning and point people toward hope and encouragement.”

Right around that time, my favorite author started a writing class. It was the first time he had ever done that. There was a financial commitment, and we were expecting our first daughter at the time, so my wife and I talked about it and prayed about it. I remember she said, “I don’t think this is a coincidence. Right when you decide you want to write a book, your favorite author holds a writing class for the first time. I think you have to do this.” So we made the decision. I joined the writing class, and the rest is history. I started writing from there and fell in love with it. It’s challenging, but it’s fun.

Kevin Johns: I’ve worked with several faith-based authors, I don’t know what the proper term is, or authors who are very spiritual in their lives. What I find is that a spiritual background tends to be valuable for staying goal-focused. I think it’s much easier for atheist writers to fall into that pit of despair: “I suck. This is pointless. No one’s ever going to read this.” Whereas the faith-based authors I’ve worked with tend to think, “There’s something bigger here. I have a message to share. There’s an audience out there somewhere. If I impact one person for the better, it’s worth it.” Did you find that your spiritual background helped in the craft and the writing process?

Josh Resinger: For sure. And just as a side note, I felt those exact same pits of despair myself. Even with the stuff I write now, I think, “What is the point? You’re just not good at this.” I have those moments. But absolutely, my faith is the driving force behind everything I do, not just what I write. I’m not going to sit here and say I pray before every single decision I make. I don’t need God to tell me to go pick my kids up from school or mow the lawn. But I try to make His leading the driving force in everything, and I think all of us have something like that at some level. What we believe shapes us and where we decide to take things.

In my stories, I try not to be too heavy-handed with the faith-based side of things, because I still believe the best stories are the ones where you don’t have to spell anything out. They’re the ones that get you thinking afterward. You read it, you’re immersed in the story, and then you think, “Wow, that was really interesting.”

And I do think my faith helped push me across the finish line, because there were plenty of nights, especially with the first draft of my very first novel, when I didn’t want to keep going. I thought, “What’s the point? Nobody’s going to read this. I’m not that good.” But then I realized: even if one person reads this, that’s all that matters. If it helps one person, that’s the point.

Kevin Johns: In your work as an associate pastor, and all the different roles you played, did you do writing through that work? I assume pastors have to write sermons on a regular basis.

Josh Resinger: Absolutely, and that’s really where I came to my conclusion as I was praying through this idea of becoming a writer. My favorite part of being a pastor was writing the sermons. I didn’t really enjoy giving them. I’m pretty good at standing up in front of people, and I still have a job where I have to do that from time to time. But the writing was the most fun: the research, digging through the Scriptures, finding connections, and writing it down in a way I could explain to other people and make it make sense.

As a worship pastor, I led the worship and did the music, and for a time I was writing some songs as well. That was the most fun part too, just the writing aspect of it. I think that’s where I got the desire and the drive to keep writing. Like I said, I wanted to keep ministering. I just didn’t know how. When I realized I could use a tool I’d already been honing for years writing sermons, only without preaching them, and write stories that serve the same purpose, that’s where it came from.

Kevin Johns: And what is that purpose? Is it offering a path to righteousness, or is it offering hope? When you say you now minister through your storytelling instead of through being a pastor, what does it mean to minister to someone?

Josh Resinger: I think it means a lot of different things to different people. My personal belief is that it’s just offering hope. The world is a difficult place, and every day it feels like it’s getting worse. You look at the news, and it’s a barrage of bad things happening, and it can be very easy to feel like you need to roll over and give up. Like you said earlier: what’s the point? So more than anything, I think ministering is helping people find hope in the darkness, realizing there’s more out there. It’s not going to be dark forever. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. There is something you can achieve, and your life matters. You’re not insignificant.

I remember watching a documentary a little while back called Return to Hogwarts, recounting the anniversary of the Harry Potter movies. I’m a big Potterhead myself, so I love that stuff. As I was watching, Emma Watson shared a story about talking to a little girl. I don’t remember the whole context, but this little girl told her, “Thank you so much,” and she asked, “For what?” And the girl said, “If Hermione can beat Voldemort, then I can beat my battle with cancer.” It gave me goosebumps, and that’s what I want to do. I want to offer people hope. If it’s through writing, great. If it’s meeting them and talking with them in person, that’s great too. But writing is the avenue I’ve discovered that’s the easiest one for me.

Kevin Johns: I was born in 1980, so I grew up in the ’90s, which I think was the era of the Kirk Cameron cheesy Christian movie. When you approach your writing from a faith-based angle, and I know you write dystopian fiction, which is never exactly cheery, how do you find that balance of offering hope without getting schmaltzy or cheesy?

Josh Resinger: That’s a great question, and it’s something I struggled with when I first set out. I thought, “How can I let my faith come through without being heavy-handed or, like you said, cheesy?” What I came to grips with is: just write the best story possible. You don’t need to force-feed anything into the story. Write a good story with a good plot and a good character who faces insurmountable odds and overcomes them. Along the way, you can sprinkle in ideas and themes like hope and forgiveness, biblical themes that maybe you don’t even realize are there as you’re reading.

My genuine hope for anyone who reads my stories is that they don’t pick up on these biblical ideals as they read. Maybe they don’t pick up on them at all. At the end, they close the book and think, “Man, that was a good story. I got a lot of hope out of that. I feel encouraged.” And maybe later they think, “I guess I hadn’t really thought about that. Forgiveness is important.” Maybe that points them to search out more meaning in forgiveness and hope, and maybe they turn to the Bible for it. That would be the ideal scenario for me.

Kevin Johns: One of the challenges, or maybe it’s just a decision, that faith-based authors face and secular authors don’t, is that there’s a big Christian market out there. Do you call yourself a Christian author, say “This is a Christian book,” and target that market? Or do you say, “I’m a dystopian author who personally has Christian beliefs that perhaps come through in the text”? Where have you landed on how to market that aspect of your writing?

Josh Resinger: As of right now, I haven’t pushed the Christian angle as much. Part of the reason is that when you read the story, there’s nothing in it that would make someone say, “Oh, wow, this is a Christian book.” There’s some language, not heavy foul language, but I tried to make the characters real. The bad guys say bad words and do bad things, and sometimes the good guys do the same things. We’re all human. We all fail and stumble, and I wanted to write something like that. So to answer your question, I’ve leaned into the post-apocalyptic dystopian genre, less so the Christian genre, because most of my stories aren’t overtly or deeply Christian. They’re stories with some Christian themes and meanings sprinkled throughout.

Kevin Johns: When you started your first book, The Story of My Life, which has become a series, did you start from a place of saying, “What’s my controlling idea? What’s the message I want to share with people?” Or did you start with genre or story and let those things emerge as you went?

Josh Resinger: I’ll never forget why I wrote The Story of My Life. My wife and I were driving to Thanksgiving dinner with her family. Typically I drive, but in this case my wife was driving, and I was looking out the window. There was a song on about Jesus dying on the cross and saving people, and I was looking at all these homes we were passing. At that time, The Walking Dead was massively popular, and I was a huge fan of that show. I started thinking, “If the world went off the rails and we had to survive by scavenging, what kinds of treasures would we find?” In a world where money doesn’t matter anymore, we’d be going through people’s homes. What would we find that had no real value but meant a lot to the people who owned it? That fascinated me.

As I was thinking about that, and hearing this song about Jesus knowing He had to go to the cross, the idea came to me: what if you found a book that told your life story, and you didn’t like the way it ended? Could you change it? Would you change it? That’s where the theme came from. There wasn’t really a choice between the two things you mentioned. It was just something that popped into my head, years before I decided to start writing. I thought it was a fun thing to play around with. Then a couple of years later I started thinking about writing, and I still had this idea in the back of my mind. It was never really a decision. It was a story I had, so I decided to write it.

Kevin Johns: And was it the course your favorite author was teaching that was the launching pad for the actual writing?

Josh Resinger: Yes, that’s where the actual writing started. The course began in early 2019, and I started writing the story in mid-2019. The idea itself first came to me around Thanksgiving 2017.

Kevin Johns: How did it feel? I’m going to assume you were still drafting or revising your dystopian book when a global pandemic hit. Is that correct?

Josh Resinger: Actually, the book officially released in early 2020, and at that point COVID was still very early. We didn’t know a lot about it. Then, as we learned more and the pandemic became what it was, it felt interesting. I thought, “Wow, I just released this book.” It felt timely in the moment, but I was also nervous that people would think I was trying to use the pandemic for my own personal gain. That’s what I was a little worried about.

Kevin Johns: Did the pandemic give you an opportunity to make progress on the sequel that you might not otherwise have had, given there was probably more free time in your life?

Josh Resinger: Not necessarily, because right around then we’d had our first daughter, and that took up a lot of my time. But the pandemic did help with the drafting of the third story, which I’m finishing up right now. In the first two novels, they mention a global contagion that wipes out humanity, but we pick up years and years later, with the world trying to rebuild. In the new novel, we find out that the contagion has re-emerged with a mutation, and they have to try to stop it for the first time. So we’re seeing the contagion on the page for the first time.

What was nice is that I have friends who are doctors, and I reached out to them. I got a lot of information about how the virus started, how it spread, the vaccine for it, and how that was created. I was able to use a lot of that in this third novel, which helped, because I knew nothing about any of it. Virology is not my strong suit. Otherwise, I’d be a virologist. So it helped with the drafting of the third novel, but not the second.

Kevin Johns: Take us back to the first novel. Set up the story for us. We know it’s about a man who finds a book of his own life, and we know it’s set in a post-apocalyptic world, post-contagion, it sounds like. Tell us a little more about the story, or perhaps your protagonist.

Josh Resinger: Absolutely. The story is about a young man named Derek Hopkins, born in this post-contagion world. His father was a Marine. There was an eccentric billionaire, a doomsday prepper named Nolan Henderson, who saw that something might be coming. He set up a place called the Colony, a big walled area where he only let in the people he thought were the most important. He networked with other doomsday preppers, and they created sanctums that were all connected, but to protect the Colony from the contagion, he only allowed certain people in, and he sent a lot of people away. So Nolan is our antagonist, but he had a reason for what he was doing. He’s not just an evil man. He was trying to protect people the best way he knew how. That’s the backstory. We don’t really see any of it. It’s hinted at throughout, but I don’t write about it directly.

The story picks up the night Derek finds the book. His dad is rushing him out of the Colony, saying, “We’ve got to go. We can’t live here anymore.” Derek doesn’t fully understand why, but he follows his dad. Nolan is chasing after them, and he shoots Derek’s father. As they’re trying to get away, his father shoves a book into Derek’s chest and says, “Do not let anyone have this book. Get out of here.” Derek takes off. His dad fights Nolan, Nolan kills his dad, and Derek holes up in an abandoned house, sad, with no idea what’s going on. He finally opens the book, and it starts writing the story of his life in real time as he reads it. It describes his birth and all of that, and he’s totally thrown.

Outside the Colony, there are two other factions. There are the Roamers, a group of cannibalistic, crazy people who roam around, killing people and eating them. And in the woods there’s a group called the Outsiders. Not much is known about them, but they’re very scary. Even the Roamers are terrified of them, so people avoid the woods. Well, in this abandoned house, some Roamers descend on Derek. The book tells him he has to go into the forest to survive. So now he’s stuck: do I stay and try to fight off this horde of Roamers by myself, or do I venture into the forest with the unknown threat of the Outsiders? And all the while, all Derek wants to do is kill Nolan for killing his father.

As he reads through the book, it starts telling him his future, and it tells him an ending he doesn’t want to hear. So the real question at the center of this story is: does a person’s behavior change the future, or does knowing the future change a person’s behavior? And which one is better?

Kevin Johns: As a spiritual person, I assume the idea of free will is a complex one for you. Are my actions my own, or did God make me do that, or encourage me to do that? How do you grapple with that in your own life and in your storytelling?

Josh Resinger: In my own life, it’s still something I grapple with. There are times I wonder: can I make any decisions on my own, or is this just the way it is? Is this my lot in life, and there’s nothing I can do to change it?

In the story, I tried to do it in a way where Derek can see only bits and pieces of the future. When I first wrote this novel and sent it to my editor, the first response was: “If this book wrote my story, I would skip right to the end and find out how it ends. I wouldn’t read everything in between.” I thought that was a really good point, because a lot of people would do that. I would do that. So I shifted it so the book only writes as you’re reading it. You can read ahead, but with everything going on, Derek keeps getting interrupted and can’t read all the way to the end. As he reads ahead, he sees glimpses of what’s coming, and that was my way of playing around with the question: how much free will and agency do we have in our lives, and how much is predetermined by God?

I’ve come to the realization in my own life that it’s a little bit of both. I believe every single person is born with a purpose. Whether that purpose is just being a good father or a good mother is ultimately up to God. But our decisions and choices can affect how we get to that point. I know you’re a big Star Wars guy, and I’m not a huge Star Wars fan, so correct me if I’m wrong here, but I like to think of it like Anakin being the chosen one. They believed he was the one to bring balance to the Force. He went to the dark side and caused a lot of havoc for a lot of people, but in the end he did bring balance to the Force. Maybe if he’d made different decisions when he was younger, he could have done it a lot sooner. We don’t know. But that’s how I look at it. He had a destiny and a purpose, and God is going to ordain those steps, but at the same time we have free will to maybe get there a little faster or delay that destiny quite a bit.

Kevin Johns: Prophecy is a tool I see misused by writers a lot, at least the beginner writers I work with. Let me use an example from the Bible. I believe there’s a prophecy that Jesus is going to arrive riding cavalry or something, and the prophecy is misinterpreted to mean he’s going to arrive with an army, and instead he arrives riding a simple donkey. Am I massacring this story, or is that somewhat correct?

Josh Resinger: No, you’re somewhere in the ballpark.

Kevin Johns: Okay. The point is that this is how you use prophecy in storytelling: it has to be misread or misinterpreted, or it only comes about because it’s actively been pushed against. Too often I see people write “He’s prophesied to be the greatest warrior ever” in chapter one, and guess what happens at the end of the book? He becomes the greatest warrior ever. I don’t think that’s an effective use of prophecy. So how do you approach that in The Story of My Life? Where does he misinterpret these future revelations, or push against them? How does your character react to having glimpses into his future?

Josh Resinger: I don’t want to give away the ending, so I won’t go too far into that. But he does see an ending he does not like. Throughout the story, he can only read a little ahead at a time, because there are forces working against him, pulling him away from the book. There are sections where he has more time to read, so he sees a little more. He learns that the book is accurate. At first he questions it: “Come on, this can’t be real.” But things start happening exactly as the book said. So, like anyone, he’s excited. “Wow, this will tell me how to kill Nolan. I’m going to use this to figure out exactly how I do it.” But as he reads ahead, he thinks, “Wait a second, this is not what the book’s telling me I’m going to do. It’s pointing me in a totally different direction, and that’s not the direction I want to go.”

So he starts trying to manipulate the book. Maybe if he does something different from what it says, it’ll change what it writes, because it’s writing in real time. He hasn’t read too far ahead, so if he changes this, maybe the next couple of sentences will be different. He changes it, and the book still puts him back and says, “This is how it’s going to end.” He pushes back and pushes back. Sometimes he uses the book to his advantage, because he’s up against a difficult situation: he reads ahead and follows exactly what it says. But that only frustrates him more, because the book is accurate every time, and it’s telling him to do something he doesn’t want to do.

Ultimately he realizes he can change the book. He can do whatever he wants, but it will come at a cost, and he has to decide whether he’s willing to pay that cost to choose his own way, or whether he wants to do the right thing. I labored over that point quite a bit. The ending scene was very difficult to write, because I knew exactly how I wanted it to end. Someone early in the process, I think it was my editor, questioned me: “Are you sure this is where you want to go with this?” And I said, “This is the only way it can end, in my opinion.” So we dove into writing it so that the ending was the only one possible for him. But it had to be a choice he made. He saw how the book ended, but I wanted to make sure he chose to end it that way, and didn’t just do it because the book told him to. So he pushes back quite a lot.

Kevin Johns: At what point did it become a series? That sounds like a very definitive ending. When did you realize there was more story to tell?

Josh Resinger: That’s a great question. When I finished that book, it was supposed to be a one-off. I had no plans to make it a series. I wrote “The End,” closed my laptop, leaned back in my chair and thought, “Yeah, that feels good.” And as I’m sitting there basking in the glory of finishing my first novel, I thought, “Wait a second.” I lifted the lid, went to the last page, and wrote an epilogue, about a page and a half, that set up a possible sequel. I had no inkling of what the story would be. It just came to me in the moment, so I wrote it down to see how it went. The bummer is that I forced myself into a series, because now I had to write the sequel.

That sequel is Dawning, and that one flowed. I know on one of your podcasts you talk about flow state, and I think I was in it for the entire novel. It came so smoothly. I had no ideas for that story going in. I just sat down and started writing, and it came out. It felt amazing, and the ending was very satisfying. When I finished, the same thing happened: I closed the laptop, leaned back, thought, “This is perfect,” and sat there feeling proud of myself. And once again, I had that feeling. So I lifted the lid, wrote one more epilogue, and now it’s turned into a trilogy.

That’s what I’m working on now: the third book, The Light That Follows. That one has been a lot more difficult to write. There’s a big time jump, so there are all-new characters. But this was never supposed to be a series. It just happened, and I boxed myself into having to write one.

Kevin Johns: You mentioned being a fan of The Walking Dead. Are there other books, films and shows that inspired the series?

Josh Resinger: For this series, no. The Walking Dead really was my primary inspiration, the whole post-apocalyptic idea. I’ve read and seen some other post-apocalyptic stuff. The Maze Runner is one, and there are some similarities between that story and this one, but it didn’t serve as any kind of inspiration. I’ve read the books and seen the movies, and I really enjoyed them, but I can’t say they were an inspiration. It really was primarily The Walking Dead.

Kevin Johns: As authors, we often pull from real life and from our own lives in our writing. Are there examples in these books, or perhaps that first book, where you were pulling from people you knew or experiences you’ve had?

Josh Resinger: There are absolutely characters in all three novels that are based on people I know, family members. Some of them very loosely; it’s really just a name and a likeness. In the first book, there’s a character called Reagan. We were young parents, and that character was based on my oldest daughter. She was only a year or two old, but the innocence and tenderness I saw in her is where I wrote Reagan from. It was the perspective of an innocent person who was very tender and loving.

Another character, Dawn, becomes really the protagonist of the entire series, because she’s a main character throughout. She was very much influenced by my own sister, who is an absolute powerhouse. I love my sister. She’s amazing, and Dawn was very much influenced by her.

As for actual instances and situations, there’s nothing from my personal life that I pulled from for these stories. But I did write a prequel novella called Entertaining Angels, which is written very deeply from the perspective of my own family’s experience in the ministry. It’s not post-apocalyptic, and it doesn’t have any of these characters, but it’s the story of where this magical book originates. This one is more heavy-handed with the Christianity angle, because it’s written from the perspective of someone whose life was in the ministry. It’s deeply ingrained in my own personal experience of people in ministry, and some of the hurts my family experienced and the forgiveness we had to learn as a result.

I pull from real life anywhere I can. In the next couple of stories I’m drafting, there’s one character in particular who’s going to be very much based on my amazing wife, so I’m looking forward to writing that character. But I try to pull from any inspiration I can find.

Kevin Johns: You mentioned being a first-time father during the pandemic. You also have your other work going on, plus being an author. I think being an author and being a father are two of the most challenging jobs in the world, and then you have to pay the bills on top of that. How do you juggle the multiple roles that we authors and parents take on?

Josh Resinger: From the time I got married, the first thing I told my wife was that nothing will come before my family. My wife and any kids we have come first, and I try to put them first in everything. If writing has to take a back seat for a couple of nights, so be it. I do my day job to the very best of my ability, because it pays the bills, but once I’m home, I’m home. It’s all about my kids. I don’t want to miss practices, races or recitals. I want to be there. That’s my primary focus.

Then there’s the writing. I have a typical day job, nine to five or eight to five, and a family, so I fit writing in whenever I can. That gets tricky sometimes, because there are nights when I get home and I’m drained and I can’t sit down and write. And I’m sure you’ve heard this too: there are people who say writers have to write every day, and if you don’t write every day, you’re not writing. I tried that for a time, but there were times I’d sit down and write for 20 minutes and get maybe three sentences I actually liked, and I’d think, “This can’t work.”

So now I make sure I sit down and write even on nights I don’t feel like it, but I’m not so strict that I have to write every single day. I think that works for some people, and if that’s you, by all means go for it. But there’s a balance. You can’t beat yourself over the head because you have to write. Write when you feel like it, write when you don’t feel like it, be gentle with yourself, and take some breaks too.

Kevin Johns: It’s interesting. People believe that if you take steroids, your muscles just grow. They see all these bodybuilders on steroids and think, “Well, yeah, they’re on steroids, that’s what makes their muscles grow.” But no. What makes your muscles grow is working out. What steroids do is allow you not to have to rest as much between workouts. So guys take steroids so they can lift seven days a week. That’s what I think about when people say, “You’re not a writer unless you write seven days a week.” I think, the only people working out seven days a week are the people on drugs.

I believe a reasonable approach to writing, or to anything in life, is like a reasonable workout program: you have rest days, you work out hard, and then your body needs time to recover. And I’d say that even before family comes your own health. You can’t take care of your family if you’re not taking care of your own health. So I’m always like: health one, family two, writing after that. I’m right there with you. I can’t even imagine a world where writing seven days a week was a possibility. Like you, I have a family and multiple jobs. I think you’re spot on. It’s a silly pressure to put on yourself as a writer, to think you’re not doing it if you’re not doing it every day. It’s nonsense.

Josh Resinger: I agree 100%. But I’d also say there’s a really easy tendency to fall into “I don’t feel like writing, I’m going to take a break today.” There has to be some discipline there as well. You need to make sure you’re writing when you can, sometimes even when you don’t feel like it. But you can’t just bang your head against the wall, “I’ve got to write tonight,” and stress out over it. Like you said, there has to be a balance.

Kevin Johns: Absolutely, that’s the corollary. I believe you probably shouldn’t write every day, because you can burn yourself out. But I also believe inspiration comes while doing the work. You can’t wait until you feel like it, or until inspiration strikes. Inspiration strikes when you do the work. This is why we work well together. Great minds think alike. You and I work together on the marketing side of things, so, as an independent author getting ready to publish your third book, what are some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way about marketing an independently published book?

Josh Resinger: I’m still learning those lessons. I haven’t seen a lot of sales from my novels yet. But what I’ve learned most goes back to being gentle with yourself. You don’t know what you don’t know, so you have to research this idea of marketing a book. And something I realized is that marketing and sales are not the same thing. I worked in retail for years, and I was a really good salesman. When I first started trying to figure out how to market my novel, people would tell me, “You were a good salesman, just do that.” But I worked for companies that did the marketing, and people came into the store looking for something specific. I just sold them what they were looking for. Marketing is a giant field. Companies pay millions upon millions of dollars for market research to get people to buy things. So be gentle with yourself, and do the research.

I did so much research on marketing, and I was hearing things from so many different people that I started thinking I had to do all of it: get a website, build an email list, make sure you’re emailing once a week, reach out to podcasters constantly, post two or three times a week on social media. I was trying to do all of it at once, and it wasn’t working. When I found Signal Boost, it was a breath of fresh air, because I was ready to give up. I was going to finish this third book, put it out there, and wash my hands of it, because I couldn’t figure this out.

But when I sat through Signal Boost and worked with you, you organized everything in a way where, even though everything you said was stuff I’d heard and researched before, I finally had meaning behind it. It wasn’t “you have to post ten times a week on Facebook.” It was “use social media in this instance, with this plan,” and everything started building together. So the best advice I could give any independent author looking for marketing help is: do your research, and then build a plan around it. Throwing stuff against the wall and hoping something sticks is never going to work. You have to have a plan, and you have to work the plan. The most important part is making sure everything points back to the genre, like you always say. That’s something I learned from you, and it changed everything for me. You market the genre, because that’s what people are looking for. I thought I was going to write a book and everybody would like it. I didn’t think I needed an ideal reader, because everybody could read this and enjoy it. But that’s not how it works. You have a genre, there are people who like that genre, and that’s who you have to look for. So make sure the entire plan is geared toward them.

And going back to what we were talking about earlier with writing: don’t burn yourself out. Market when you can, be comfortable living with the results, but be consistent. That’s another thing: be consistent with it.

Kevin Johns: I remember hosting my first webinar. I’d taken all these courses, and the people teaching how to sell on a webinar are marketing experts telling you stories like, “I finished my webinar and my phone started shaking, and then smoking” from all the sales. Then I hosted my webinar, looked at my phone, and I wasn’t seeing a trillion dollars in sales come through. That’s a lesson you learn early: these techniques can work, but it takes time and patience to build an audience and a community. Some of what you hear from marketers is not for beginners, or not for someone just building an audience, or not, frankly, for someone selling a book. You could be a real estate agent who makes six sales this quarter, and that’s an awesome quarter; you’re in the money. As someone selling a book, if you make six sales this quarter, it’s not making a big dent in your income. So it all takes time and effort. But you’re doing great. For folks who want to check out the series, you mentioned the prequel. Is there a place where they can sign up and get that from you?

Josh Resinger: Absolutely. If they go to my website, joshresinger.com, they can join my mailing list and I’ll send them the novella absolutely free. They can read it, enjoy it, and follow along. I’ll say I’m not as consistent with my mailing list as I should be. I burned myself out early on, because every time I’d send something, I didn’t know what to say, and people were unsubscribing. So I typically send once a month. If you’re looking for a free novella to read, and you want to support me, that would be great, and I promise I’ll only email you about once a month.

Kevin Johns: Fantastic. Well, Josh, thank you so much for taking the time to join me on the show today. As I said, I was looking forward to this opportunity to hear a bit more about your backstory and your process and where you’re coming from. So I’m really thankful that you’ve come into my life, and really grateful that you took the time to be on the show.

Josh Resinger: Thanks for having me. It was a blast. And for any other authors out there, I highly recommend working with Kevin. He’s excellent, and he’s really helped me out a ton. We’ve only just started working together, really, and I’m looking forward to continuing. I can’t say enough good things about Kevin.