Welcome to The Writing Coach. On this podcast, I speak with the instructors, editors, coaches, and mentors who help writers and authors create their art, build their audience, and sell their work.
In episode #115 of The Writing Coach podcast, I speak with my client, author Michael E. Ginsberg.
Michael is an attorney in Washington, DC, practicing in the field of national security law. He spent a decade in private practice at Arnold & Porter LLP in Washington, DC, and then worked several years in the U.S. government as a Senior Associate General Counsel in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where he served as legal counsel for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. He currently is Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at a Virginia-based defense contractor.
His debut novel, DEBT BOMB, is a political thriller, tied into real-world events, about an apocalyptic threat to America that is ticking remorselessly in the background while Americans continue their daily routines, oblivious to the danger.
During our discussion, Michael describes:
- His varied and diverse interests in sports, spaceflight, history, politics, and journalism
- What he learned working as a journalist and editor for the Harvard Crimson newspaper
- How a genuine fear concerning the American national debt inspired the plot of his novel
- Why he chose to work with a book coach and what he got out of the experience
- How he maintained focus on his manuscript throughout the pandemic
- Why he chose to work with hybrid publisher BQB Publishing and what the publisher brought to the project
- And much more!
Listen to the full podcast episode:
Watch the video of the interview:
The Writing Coach Episode #115 Show Notes
Episode Transcript
Today on The Writing Coach podcast, I have Michael E Ginsburg. Michael, it’s so good to see you. Welcome to the show.
It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
I was thinking about it. Obviously, you’re a former client of mine and you worked really, really hard on your book. Most of my clients do. And so generally, even though I spend hours and hours talking to the clients, like you, we mostly are talking about the work. And so I’m actually looking forward to this opportunity to get to chat with you about your life a bit, because really all of our discussions have been focused on the manuscript. And so it’s exciting for this opportunity to get to know you personally a bit better.
I’m happy to chat. I’m excited to connect again and very excited about all the good work we did together.
I know you’re a baseball fan, but now, if they’re watching the video, will know you’re a huge fan. Let’s go back to childhood. Were you mostly into sports as a kid or was writing and books part of your life as a child?
Had a lot of different interests as a kid. I, you know, I, sports were definitely an interest, played, little league baseball played tennis. I ran cross country. I was also very interested in space flight. So I, I spent a lot of time studying I did a lot of science classes and went to space camp, us space camp a couple of times and did a lot of those things. In fact, I studied engineering as a, as an undergrad. So certainly that was an interest as well. But yeah, those were sort of probably my biggest couple of interests growing up. We wrote books.
Were there novels or as a kid books that really interested you?
Yeah, no, definitely. Definitely. There were, I, you know, I was a huge history buff and I love reading history. I love reading biographies. And especially, you know, I really enjoy you know, political history and military history from the 20th century. So I read a lot of that. Both us history and international history world history. So I, you know, I, and, and some of that probably influenced the writing because, you know, so many of the things I, I read and I wrote, or that I wrote about were things that I picked up or saw as I read in terms of fiction. I think I really enjoy things like Tom Clancy, you know, so you can imagine the, the sort of the techno thriller that have a lot of, you know, real elements to them. I mean, a lot of it is based in reality, but spun up to be sort of an exciting and dramatic book. Well,
I haven’t even mentioned DEBT BOMB yet. Michael Ginsburg’s new book DEBT BOMB came out three days ago. And I think pretty clearly those Tom Clancy influences are there in the book.
Yeah, no, they definitely are. They definitely are, you know, between my, the reading Tom Clancy and similar books, you know, there are a lot of folks that write similar books, like like, like that, that vein. And also my personal, you know, now I’ve worked as an attorney but I spent several years in the U S to officer director of national intelligence. So, you know, a lot of the things I saw and I learned influenced my writing. So it all kind of hangs together when you, when you step back from it.
As someone who’s worked in real life national security, how big is the gap between the things we see in fiction and what’s really going on in the real world?
I mean, I think there’s, there’s some gap but you know, there there’s a lot of, you know, realism, particularly writers like Tom Clancy bring a lot of realism to their work. And so you can sort of see the influences that, that he clearly had. She, you can tell that it’s grounded in reality, certainly there’s exaggerations and obviously things are sped up. You know, one of the things that you realize when you’re in the government is things don’t move quickly, you know, in two hour movie blocks. So you know, it, it, it doesn’t move quite at that pace, but there are, there are a lot of there’s certainly it is fair to say it, it reflects a reality.
I knew you were a Harvard grad, and I knew you were an attorney, but looking at your bio, I found out you also have a different master’s from Stanford in an area that I didn’t even know what it was. So tell me about this Stanford master’s degree.
Sure. So it’s called aeronautics and astronautics. It’s essentially the aerospace engineering. So it’s, it’s more or less engineering for spacecraft aircraft satellites, those types of things. And that, that’s kind of what I did when I was out there. I focused primarily on composite structures. So things made out of composites, air frames, fuel tanks, things like that, that are made from composite materials that obviously because they’re lightweight they have a lot of advantages over, you know classic metals, you know, aluminum, things like that. So there’s that, that’s kind of what, what I studied for a couple of years there at Stanford. This is the first,
This is the first time we’ve got into a discussion about lightweight aluminums in my podcast ever.
There’s a first time for everything.
There doesn’t seem to be, at least on the surface, a lot of crossover between law and aerospace engineering. How do those things come together for you, or do you just have diverse interests?
Well, it’s probably a lot of the latter. I certainly have diverse interests there. Surprisingly, there are areas where overlap, you know, I was always interested in politics in addition to space flight and of course, a space flight, like everything else that’s funded by the government is, you know, has politics and political aspects to it. Decisions are made for, you know, influenced by politics. And of course, you know, here in the United States you know, the NASA administrator as a political appointee is appointed by the president. So you know, that there is certainly like everything else that government does, there’s a political element to it. And that always interested me. And when I was at Stanford, you know, it’s the number of classes in the operations research department on the topic of the intersection between science and national security.
And so you would talk about things like atomic, you know, nuclear policy whether it’s developing nuclear weapons, safeguarding, nuclear weapons, disposing of nuclear weapons, all those sorts of things, but how should we, what, what should the doctrine of use be all those sorts of things. And of course missile space, all of that understanding the technology helps understand the not only what we do and our capabilities, but what, you know, others, you know, the adversaries are thinking about what they’re contemplating doing, so you can understand, okay, they’re doing this. I know what that means. So it, it there’s surprisingly overlap, but it’s, it’s, it’s not obvious. I mean, it’s, you have to dig a little bit to see where it’s at.
What about the Harvard and the creative writing overlap? Because there’s a long tradition from national Lampoon too. I know a lot of the writers on the Simpsons come out of Harvard in your time at Harvard, did you rub shoulders at all with the writing community there?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So I spent four years as a sports writer for the newspaper. So I was, I was actually an editor of the Harvard Crimson, which was, is the daily paper. I’m not sure they actually do print additions anymore. It may just be online, but certainly when I was there, we had print runs and we had you know, those giant press in the basement and, you know, we inked it up and, you know, out, you know, the thing spooled out. But so I was an editor of the paper. So I did the layout. I did, I covered hockey, I covered lacrosse and I covered soccer. So I, I spent a lot of time traveling with the team and writing about the team and interviewing players and coaches and things like that. And of course, when I was at the Crimson I worked with a lot of folks from the news shy, you know, I got to know them, so yeah, no, there there’s definitely overlap. You know, a few people I can think of. I know for example, shool Chan he used to work at the New York times. He’s now the op-ed editor for the Los Angeles times. And I know a few people that went on to like Washington post and things like that, for sure.
Was it your love of sports that drew you into journalism or did you just want to be a journalist and you happen to like sports?
That’s, you know, it’s an interesting question. Like so many things I think in, in life, you know, I almost always fell into it almost by accident. I always loved sports. I mean, there’s no question about that and really did enjoy that. Certainly never thought of it as a career, but I enjoyed it, but I went to the open house, you know, the first week of college and I went there and I was like, oh, this sounds good. And they immediately gave me a sport to go over. They sent me into a water polo game and I covered the water polo game and really enjoyed it. So I covered in up their game. And then, you know, one thing led to another and, you know, there, I was pretty much in meshed in and I really enjoyed it.
Were you doing any fiction writing at that time or were you primarily focused on non-fiction?
I was primarily focused on non-fiction. I did have a column, you know, a sports column. So I, I was sort of an opinion piece. So in that sense, it wasn’t a writing just fact, but sort of here’s what I’m thinking, or, you know, try to be funny, you know, try to so-so, there’s certainly a creative aspect to that. And of course we, all the first year at Harvard, you have to take a what they call expository writing. So you have to, you know, do that as well. So I did that. And, and throughout Harvard, you know, you have core curriculum requirements. So I took a poetry class. I took several history classes, but I didn’t have as much creative writing opportunities as maybe I would’ve liked at the time you know, spending so much time in the engineering lab. You know, it didn’t give me a lot of time to, you know, most of what I was writing at numbers and Greek letters and all that stuff.
So at what point did the idea of being a novelist start percolating in the back of your mind?
I’d always, you know, I love writing as you become an attorney. And I, I really, one of the things I struggled with as an attorney was making my writing goods. I really worked at it. I spent a lot of time working at it, worked for judges who were good writers expressly with the purpose of trying to become a better writer. And I, I really developed it through my time in practice and clerking for judges and things like that. But what really spurred it was the fact that I, I was really the issue that I cover in debt. The national debt, the U S national debt. It really scared me. I, you know, it just, it, and I thought, I kept thinking to myself, what if this happens? What if that happens? What if the other thing happens? And the more I thought about it, and I thought, well, you know, it’s, it’s sort of marinating in my mind, but these are actually kind of interesting thoughts. Maybe there’s a story there. And so I, I married my interest in writing with this story that was in my head and got to work
Well, this might be why you and I connected. I think there’s a lot of writers out there. I read all these writing instructional books about the beautiful transformative nature of writing and how you can release your soul or, or, you know, process trauma. And like, for me, I’m just like writing, it’s an outlet for rage and fear and anger. And it’s like, I think, I think that’s maybe why we, it, to this idea of, you wanted to tell a great thriller story, but you wanted to do it. And you were coming from a genuine place of concern and fear about something happening in the real world.
Yeah, no, that’s right. That’s right. I, you know, I joke, you know, there’s, some people monetize really you know, wild ideas on the internet. And I said, well, I’m going to monetize my fear, but you know, all kidding aside. I thought, you know, this is an opportunity to, to both I, I, it’s an issue that really does worry me and it’s an issue. I think that doesn’t get the attention it does because it’s not an obvious crisis. It’s sort of a slow moving thing. You know, there’s that old Hemingway line from sun also rises, you know, how did you go bankrupt, you know, first, gradually, and then suddenly. And so I think we’re in the gradually phase of it all, and I’m, I’m scared to death of the suddenly phase. And so I thought, well, here’s an opportunity both to entertain, but also you know, get that point, make people think of it, just kind of get that kind of kernel in people’s mind. And, you know, there’s something to think about you and some real underlying this,
This is one of the things that’s really interesting for me working with a lot of different writers from all around the world. Often they have expertise in different areas or different passions that I don’t know that much about or that I don’t relate to necessarily. And so I often kind of focus on story and craft and, and those aspects of, of helping the writer. And then they bring in their passion and expertise on different areas. But I was reading since the book came out two days ago, I was rereading it while reading it for the first time as a published book. And something that occurred to me was, I think you were really smart with the opening scene in that the idea of national debt, especially for someone like me, a Canadian, I don’t know much about America. I don’t know enough about my own country’s economic situation, let alone Americas. But something you do in the opening scene of the book is you personalize it. You say here’s the big national issue, but here it is on a one person level. And I think that’s a great way to bring the reader into the book, especially someone like myself who might not know much about fiscal policy or even debt management, or just my own financial handling.
Yeah, yeah, no, it’s true. I mean, I think that there, there are a lot of similarities. I mean, obviously there, there are certainly differences between a national government and and you know, an individual’s personal finances, but at some level, you know, the deepest, the most fundamental level they’re, they’re similar. I mean, there’s that, I love going back to old, people’s quote, older quotes from the past, and there’s the, the economist Herbert Stein. He says things that can’t go on forever, we’ll stop. And in, in, at the end and what you’re, you’re alluding to. And I think you’re exactly right about this night. That’s why I think that I, I appreciate that that’s the first scene works is because the timeframe for which it stops is different for an individual than for our country, but it’s still ultimately the same underlying principle. And I, yeah, appreciate that, that you think that works because that was certainly what I was going for.
Let’s tell the listeners or viewers a bit about the book itself. Tell us about DEBT BOMB.
Sure, sure. So that balm is it asks the question, what would happen if the United States entered a, a real honest to goodness debt crisis, and that that crisis was engineered by an American adversary. In this case, the people’s Republic of China what would happen, what would be the consequences and how do we get ourselves out of it? So the story revolves around a plot to do just that by the Chinese to engineer and American debt crisis. And the debt crisis means that America can’t pay its debt and can’t borrow, and it’s stuck in this position of either defaulting, which is a, you know, a terrible situation and probably would bring down the entire economy or making dramatic cuts to its economy, or, or what have you somehow coping with the situation. And that that’s really, the story is on the one hand, you have the Chinese trying to engineer this debt crisis in an effort to defeat the United States and become the global hedge Amman.
And you have on the other side, the suburban accountant who like me, you know, I was just worried about the debt, but can’t get anybody to listen to her, but somehow breaks through and gets one person to listen to her. And that person brings her onto his presidential campaign. And he ultimately wins. And she becomes a, the budget director for the country. And that the two paths collide when the Chinese debt crisis runs into our heroine’s efforts to stop the debt problem. And they had all the issues and the whole story flow from there. And it’s got spies embedded here and there, and there were people looking in the shadows and of course you have the Chinese government doing its thing. So it’s, it’s a really it covers a lot of ground and a lot of different issues, but that, that’s sort of another story. Yeah.
And I think the interesting thing is we kind of touched on at the end there, this is a very real topic. Something you’ve said is very passionate to you and terrifying to you, a real concern in the real world that you’re, you’re kind of an activist for in the real world, but then you take that real world concern. And it’s really wrapped in a fun adventure with spies and espionage. And I mean, I think we talked about James Bond. We talked Tom Clancy. I mean, it’s a great thriller, exciting, fun, this story. It just happens to have at its beating heart a message that means a lot to you.
Exactly, exactly. And I think, you know, it’s advice, you know, you gave, and others have given, you know, right. The things that, you know, you know, write about what, you know, and being able to take something that, you know, it makes it a lot easier to spin the story because you, you have a feel for the underlying issues. But also, you know, like you say, you know, bringing in that entertaining aspect of it, I thought it was important because I did want this book to be read widely, you know, I didn’t want this to be like a white paper, you know, I wanted it to be I joke with people, I said, it’s sort of one part, a white paper, one part Manchurian candidate. And one part HBO’s beyond scared straight if you’ve seen it, you know, it’s trying to combine all of that into an interesting story.
One of the things that I find so amazing about your work on this book, I mean, I’ve worked with a few lawyers now and they are some of the smartest, hardest working people I’ve ever worked with. And for you, you were writing this, you’re a lawyer for one lawyers are busy people, you have a young family, and then the pandemic happened. Know, these were some of the most challenging times of my life. Part of the most challenged times of many people’s lives, how did you remain focused and make such great progress on this manuscript while the world was being turned upside down?
That’s a great question. And I know it has been hard for, for a lot of, oh, certainly hard. I mean, it was hard on me. It was harder on the kids. I mean, it was really challenging for kids to be stuck at home and, and, and so forth. You know, it just, it was a challenging time in some ways, you know, I found it kind of therapeutic to be able to kind of just close the door, go into the basement and right. So in a way it was one of the things that got me through, you know, focusing on it in that way. And I kinda stayed with the process that I had been using before the pan Deming kit, which was getting up very early and spending two or three hours before the Workday writing staying up a little later and, you know, couple of hours before going to bed writing. And then of course, you know, during the course of the day, if I had something that popped into my head, I was working from home. I just, you know, dive in and try to do it. But to be honest with you, it was nice to have especially at a time where you really couldn’t do much outside other than, you know, take a walk or something like that. It was, it was good to have something to put your mind on it. Wasn’t you know, scary and distressing. I could
I can see also how the whole experience almost justifies the premise of your novel in that people said the whole world can never turn upside down. And then it did, you know, you were telling a story where you’re saying to everyone, everything, you know, could change. Right. I don’t know, prior to the pandemic, that would have seemed pretty far out there. Now we’ve seen the whole world. We’ve seen every aspect of our lives change overnight which perhaps I could see it’s inspiring when writing a story, but the world turning upside down.
Exactly. No, that’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. And, and one of the, the thesis of, you know, folks like me who worry about the debt is that in good times, you ought to not be building up debt because you never know when you are going to need to spend huge amounts of money because some crisis you didn’t predict comes along and demands it. And that’s exactly what the pandemic was. I mean, the United States has probably spent, you know, at least three or $4 trillion in various kinds of stimulus, economic assistance, all these sorts of things and crises, or when you should spend like that and go into debt, if you have to and all that. But we have much less flexibility because we started from such a high debt point and that’s only gotten worse. So when the next, who knows what racists we can’t predict, as you say, the pandemic is one of these things that nobody re, I mean, I guess some people sort of thought, well, that could happen, but nobody was planning for that possibility. And it’s just such an astronomical sum of money. You know, you hate to think about it, but if there’s another world war, you’re going to be able to fight it. All those shorts are things you just the pandemic sort of put that into relief. Absolutely.
Going back to writing for a moment, what brought you to me at what point did you say, did you, did you know, writing coaches were out there? How did we end up working together?
Sure. No, it’s a, it’s a great question. You know, I talked to a variety of people out in the world and they’re, they’re folks, you can look at it on the internet and things like that. You know, I looked at, for example, Jane Friedman, you know, who’s, who’s very, well-known in the space about publishing and writing. And I had an opportunity to, to talk to her a little bit more work a little bit with her and you know, drafting some of the you know query letters and things like that. And in the course of that, you know, I asked her about, you know, what do you think of a writing coach? And she thought it was a great idea. So I began researching writing coaches and I was looking for somebody who I thought, you know, would understand and would be sort of, you know, on my wave light, I guess you could say. And so I went to the, you know, people that are all kinds of names out there, but I, I, I liked your website. And I, I said, I’m going to reach out. And I talked to other folks and you know, I just, I felt like in talking with you, it really just felt like I was on the same wavelength and you kind of got where, what I was trying to do and where I was going. And you know, I said, this is, this is good. I I’d like to proceed
For someone who hasn’t worked with a writing coach. How would you describe the experience? What did you get out of it?
I found it tremendously valuable. I mean, tremendously valuable. In addition to obviously taking a book from one place to another place from, you know, a, a good story that had, you know, a lot of potential to a really polished work that not only was polished, but had sort of professionalized, I guess you could say, I’m not a professional writer. So adding those professional elements of —
You published a book this week. You are a professional writer my friend.
But I didn’t start there at that. And that, you know, I mean, you got me there and working with you, I, now I now understand, you know, the way of a structure of a story, you know, how to structure things and character development and all these things that, you know, you might learn if you were a, you know, a creative writing scholar in college or in graduate school. But, you know, if you didn’t go through that, you know, you, you wouldn’t have had that. And so you need that. I, I think I needed. And that’s why I say, I think it took the story from a, a good role material. There’s a good story there to polishing it to a place where you know, I’m comfortable sending it out into the world. And that, that made all the difference and the process, you know, just the learning, how to edit and how to go through things, how to look at things. I mean, all of these, it just at my vantage point changed just like you say, you know, I’m a professional now, but I wasn’t at the beginning,
None of us get there on our own. This is the big myth of, of publishing. Unfortunately they throw one author’s name on the front, and then everyone just thinks, you know, a person sits down and types it all up first, try hits print, and sends it out to the, to the bookstores. Right. Which is obviously not the case. A lot of people are involved in the creation of a book. So tell me about the process of working with your publisher then.
Sure, sure. So I worked with a hybrid publisher, a company called BQB, and I found that to be a really good option for someone like me, who had gone through a pretty rigorous process of editing and developing. But you know, not just sort of self-publishing, I, I like, you know, I, I was really going back and forth between self publishing, traditional publishing and hybrid publishing. And the reason I liked the hybrid option was because it had one more layer of, of editing review and, and, you know, line editing, things like that. They also had some ideas, creative ideas about marketing and connections to marketing efforts. So they, they understood that world in a way that I didn’t, you know, that I, I think I understand a lot better now. But they helped me understand and they helped me learn that aspect of things as well.
So that was a valuable process. It probably added six months two things in the end, I think those six months were, were well worth it. And I don’t think it hurt that, you know, in the end, I think it’s probably better where the time it came out originally, I had hoped they would come out before the election, but I think it probably would have gotten lost in the noise of the election. And I think now, particularly where here in America, we are still talking about trillion dollar spending bills that has come into refocus as a real issue. And and so that timing worked out. So I, I think that the, the hybrid model was very good. It can be, it’s not tremendously expensive as the other thing that I liked about it can be expensive. Some are expensive, some are less expensive. And I went sort of with the less expensive option but I thought they did a really good job. In fact, I think some of those more expensive options actually do less work. So, you know, I think, I guess for folks listening, you do need to look at these different folks carefully.
Shockingly, the guy who wrote the book about debt did not go with the most expensive option.
Right. Imagine that.
Well, Mike, the book has been out for three days now, how does it feel to have the book out in the world and to be an author?
It, it, it definitely put a pep in my step. I mean, it really feels like, wow, you know, I, I actually did it, you know, I mean, I did it, that kind of reaction. And you know, people were starting to read it and I’m starting to get feedback and it’s really cool to hear, you know, people number one, reading it, and number two saying, you know, this is good. Just got, you know, I had somebody to say, you know, I was delayed in the airport and I read it the whole, the whole way, and this was great, you know? So it’s, it’s, it’s, it, it feels like, it feels like the end of a long journey and it, it has also you know, kind of say what my appetite to do another one. Excellent.
Excellent. Yeah. I want to ask you about that, what you’ve got up next, but going back to sticking with Deb on for a little bit more, what’s the plan here in terms of promotion or marketing, are you going to be doing more podcasts or what’s your plan to kind of get word out there about the book?
Sure, sure. No, I’m definitely, I’m trying to do more podcasts. I have marketed it in the think tank world in the political world here in the United States. So I have friends in the PR world cause I, I do political stuff on the side. So I have friends in that world who I, who are helping me kind of, you know, get it into the bloodstream. I’m also doing a a virtual, I guess, unfortunately it’s virtual book tour with with a bunch of blogs. So it’s going to be featured on a whole bunch of blogs over the course of July. So I’m very excited about that. And then, you know, word of mouth LinkedIn, you know, it’s funny, LinkedIn is remarkably good source. Like I get, I get more for LinkedIn and Facebook, to be honest. I get a lot of maybe because LinkedIn has more of a, the audience, you know, that, that I’m going for just, maybe it is more on LinkedIn, but they, they definitely, I’ve gotten a lot of reactions and, you know, we’ll see how people feel after they read the book. But and of course, you know, word of mouth is huge.
Absolutely. All right. So looking to the future, you’re going to do another book.
Oh, definitely. Definitely. I’ve already started thinking about it. And you know, one of the, kind of the general I’m sort of thinking about, and then maybe this gets to another sort of personal issue of mine is that I, I love history and I’m not sure that our American school system is doing the best job of teaching history that it could not that it’s bad. I mean, I, I think I got, you know, a good history education, but there were a lot of things that the history didn’t cover. It just didn’t make it in. And part of that is just, you know, you only have so much time and you gotta hit the basics. And so one of the things I I’ve been thinking about doing as a genre where you, you take sort of historical events and historical happenings and fictionalize, you know, unusual historical events that people may not know about, but are really interesting and turn them into fiction. Because I think that there is a, and in that way, you know, you do two things. Number one, you write a great story. But you also kind of shine light on these, these important, but perhaps obscure historical happenings. And so I have a couple in my mind that I think are going to form the basis of my next tour. Well,
Knowing your work ethic and your intelligence and passion, I’m sure whatever project you move forward with is going to be great.
I’m excited. I thank you. I appreciate that.
Okay. I wanted to ask you men, your publisher sent you the proof of your book for the first time and you held that paperback copy in your hands. Can you tell me about that experience?
Oh yeah. No, it’s so cool. I mean, you you’re looking at it and you’re like, wow, this came out, you know, there’s the cover looks great. And you know, it’s got quotes on the back end. It’s a real, I did it, you know, you’re, you’re holding it like this thing. You know, it’s like your Newborn child. I don’t want to drop it, you know, my God.
But, and then you look through it and, and then you know, you’re like, please don’t see an error, please didn’t see a mistake, but then you get through it. And you’re like, it looks, I mean, this is a real thing. It’s a real book, you know, it’s not you know, it’s not just a pamphlet. It’s not just something I printed out. It’s, it’s real. I mean, there’s it just hits you that, gosh, this is even when they sent me the advanced review copy that was in PDF, you know, I was like, wow, this looks like a real book. Well, it’s, it’s a great feeling.
I’m so proud of you, Mike. I loved working with you on this project. And, you know, I work with a lot of writers. Some of them reached the finish line and some of them don’t. And so w w when I do get that email saying the book’s coming out on such and such date, I it’s it’s a really, it’s a really amazing feeling for me. It’s part of what makes my job so rewarding, so rewarding whatever, whatever heartache you and I went through. And obviously it’s always the clients who go through the, the, put it in the most work and go through the most challenges, but I’m there with you. And when we’ve reached that finish line and it becomes that real thing out in the world, I, I couldn’t be happier for you. So congratulations, Mike.
Well, thank you. I appreciate it. And I, you know, I, like I say before, I, you know, I could not have done it without your help. I think it you know, we took a, a good idea that had a lot of potential and we made it into a really polished book. And I, you know, I can’t recommend working with a writing coach and working with you. I mean, the experience was great. And like I say, I just, I learned so much that I, you know, I feel like I can use it and I’m sure I can learn more, but I just, you know, where I was at the beginning where I was at the end, I mean, it’s just, it’s, it’s so palpably, I made such palpable progress as a writer. It’s, it’s really gratifying to have gone through that process with you and to have all your help on that.
Well, DEBT BOMB is out now, where should we send people to pick it up or to learn more?
Yeah, you can get it on Amazon. You can get it at Barnes and noble. You can get it on the publisher BQB publishing. IPG has it. If you go to IPG, you can get it there. If you go to my website MichaelEginsburg.com. You go to that website, or you can just Google Michael Ginsburg debt bomb. You should be able to find that page you’ll have links to every one of those. Every one of those different places where you can get the book and you can learn a little bit more about me and the book and all the, so there’s a trailer video, which is kind of cool. You know, it’s funny, we had to, we had to edit it to Amazon because we had one scene in there. There was a tank rolling in, and there was a ship rolling, and it was too violent for them. So then we had to, we had to revise, take that out and do a few things. I mean, it wasn’t even shooting. It was just you know, a worship in the sea kind of Amazon, but anyway, it was fun and you know, they have been helpful, but yeah, that’s, that’s where to go.
Thank you so much for being a guest on the show today.
Oh, sure. Thank you for having me. Thank you again for all your help. It was a delight working with you.
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