Three Years of Rising Authors 🎉

I clicked to join the emergency all team meeting. Staring into little screens and on to peoples faces. I can feel the weight of what was about to happen over this dramatic zoom call.

Three years ago, I was unexpectedly laid off from the publishing company I was working for.

I'd been there almost three years, most of it part-time as a community manager, and had finally landed my full-time role just a few months before. Then it was gone. Over 180 of us got let go that day, and a lot of authors got the bad end of the stick too. They were left without a finished book and no money back. I'm reflecting on it now because it was a hard place for so many people, and it was hard to watch.

But let me back up.

Before the publishing company, I owned a print shop. I've mentioned it before. I ran it for ten years and grew it into a million dollar shop. Then the pandemic crushed it, and I sold it for dimes on the dollar. Running a big business was hard, but it taught me so much about so many aspects of business and especially marketing. Business also an emotional toll, especially when you feel alone in it and trying to build something from the ground up which takes up time and so much energy.

After that chapter, I was ready for something lighter. Something I could do from a laptop, from anywhere, that could still provide for me and my family.

The publishing company hired me a few months before I launched my own book. I went on to help run the same in-person event that had changed my life when I first attended it in 2019. That event was the moment I finally felt like I was somewhere I could be myself, be challenged, and do something hard without it requiring all of me, physically and emotionally. I was doing it on a laptop.

Those in-person stretches were some of the most fun I've ever had. I'd travel to Austin every few months to work alongside great writers, editors, and marketers, helping experts get their life's work onto paper. The goal was simple: give them an experience so good they'd refer others to us, and the cycle would repeat. Things were going great, and I was learning at lightning speed.

My writing went from okay to much better in those years, and it came down to one thing: I had to deliver every single week.

Every week, Chas and Emily ran an author call, answering questions from the writers who'd been at the in-person event. I loved the call. What I didn't love was having to write a full summary of it afterward. A lot of weeks, I hated doing it. Not because it was hard, but because it was so uncomfortable. I was worried about what Chas, my editor and partner in crime, would think of my writing. And what the readers would think too.

But I did it anyway. I wrote the notes, turned them into a real summary, and passed them to Chas, who'd put them together even better than I could. After a few months, I started leaning in. I'd study his edits, where he cleaned up my writing, and started anticipating those fixes before he made them. That, I think, is where my writing actually got better. We always got great feedback on those summaries. People who couldn't make the call told us they learned just as much from reading them.

Today, I love that practice. I keep it alive every week through this newsletter, summarizing my ideas, stories, marketing strategies, the struggles of the authorpreneur life, whatever it is. The hard thing we do every week, the thing that pushes us out of our comfort zone, is exactly the thing we should do more of.

I'm grateful I learned that.

After being laid off, I built a community on a Circle platform and called it Rising Authors. The idea was right there in the name: we have to keep rising, no matter how many times we fall. Honestly, it felt like a living testament to the book I'd written about resilience, like I was suddenly experiencing my own thesis in real time. I'd already sold my shop, moved to Arizona, and started my life over with no family or friends nearby. It was incredibly difficult. But I'd done hard things before, so I knew I'd be okay.

Emotionally, though, it was rough. I was 36 and starting over felt like a reset I hadn't asked for, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed.

I hadn't intended to sell anyone on anything. I'd just get into conversations with experts and coaches and realize they didn't have a website, or a real online presence. So I'd build them something simple. Quietly, I started brewing an idea of what a business beyond the company might look like, because a stable full-time role there was starting to feel out of reach. They did eventually offer me the full-time multimedia role I wanted, running the podcast, Author Hour, where I was interviewing two or three authors every other day and sharpening my interview skills fast.

Two months later, I was laid off.

And that put everything I'd been doing on the side into full motion. All the people I'd been helping became the core of the community I built. I was right in the center of a huge challenge, and a huge opportunity to help.

Here's the crazy part.

I'd booked my very first paid vacation: Fiji, June 2023. I'd never had a paid vacation in my life, and Hannah and I were finally going to unwind. Then I got laid off, but the trip was already booked, so we went anyway and made the best of it. I still remember sitting in that hotel lobby, feet in the sand, jobless and unsure how I'd cover the next month's mortgage, when I officially hit publish on a post that officially launched the Rising Authors community and services right there.

After a few days of hype and fun in Fiji trying not to over think my whole situation, prayers began to be answered.

My friend Bobby Harrington became one of my first clients to help him launch his boo. A few days later my friend Greg Giuliano sent me a message became my second client that same week. As they say, the rest is history.

I've loved every moment of building this little agency. We've grown to a team of four. They're part-timers, but I'm lucky to have them and their support. I've gotten to work with dozens of authors who've gone on to do amazing things: featured in Forbes and Entrepreneur, landing on incredible podcasts, launching their own shows, publishing more books, growing audiences into the thousands, and standing on TEDx stages.

This week is a celebratory one. Eight people have signed up for the Author X Brand Camp, kicking off Friday the 26th. This is something I've wanted to do since the day I started Rising Authors. It's an in-person event meant to recreate some of that life-changing energy I first felt when I started writing my own book. It's a little different, but I think it's going to be just as fun and just as memorable.

For me, these past three years have always been about one thing: keeping the practice going and getting a little better with time. Sharing the work. Documenting the process and the wisdom. Keeping the podcast alive, even virtually. Meeting new people and picking things up along the way.

I hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, my podcast series and all that I get to work on as much as I've enjoyed creating it and building it for you.

So, cheers to three years, and God willing, many more as we keep rising.

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Hussein