Jack: I found that writing was something I enjoyed, but I was actually good at it, so I guess it’s important to find not something that you think you wanna do but something that you are good at and enjoy because I think, unless you’re good at something, it’s very hard to be happy doing it. And you don’t necessarily know what you’re good at. I found that by accident.

Introduction

Welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast with Bryan Collins. Here, you’ll find practical advice and interviews for all kinds of writers.

Bryan: Interviews, how should you approach them if you’re writing a nonfiction book? Hi there. My name is Bryan Collins and welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast. So, I spent a lot of time over the years interviewing guests for this podcast, for example, but also when I was a freelance journalist, I used to interview CEOs of companies, founders, and creators for local newspapers, radio stations, and so on. Interviews can seem like they’re pretty easy. You just turn up, open up your voice recorder or fire up your Zoom connection, hit record, and ask them a few questions. But it can take almost as long to prepare for an interview in advance, particularly if you don’t know what the topic is about. So when I’m getting ready for an interview, I like to, you know, read some work by the author in question. I also like to write down a list of five or ten questions related to the key ideas in their work, check out what they’re saying or doing on social media, learn about their background and see where else they’ve been featured. Now, sometimes, if you’re particularly knowledgeable about a topic, you probably don’t need to go to this level of research because you can just go dive straight into the subject matter. That said, I always find it helpful if you figure out an angle for your interview in advance because it can give a strong structure. I also like writing interviews because they are helpful for adding a little bit of credibility and a third party voice to nonfiction. So, if you’re writing a nonfiction book about a particular topic, rather than simply regurgitating information and using personal stories, both of which are useful, helpful, and informative for readers, consider adding a little bit of credibility by interviewing a third-party expert in your niche, because often, that can give a different point of view which the readers can find informative. 

Now, one series of books that’s made a big impact on me over the years is the Market Wizards series by Jack Schwager. He profiles day traders, investors, and various types of financial entrepreneurs who have made money in the markets. Now, I don’t trade, I don’t day trade, but I particularly like these books because it’s a good insight into a different type of career to an everyday job. I also saw some commonalities between writers who spend a lot of time alone in a room writing and day traders who can do the same except in front of their terminals or computer screens. But I also like these series of books because of how Jack uses interviews to craft a compelling argument inside of his chapters in the book. The Market Wizard series extends over five books and he’s spent 30 years working on this particular series, so when I caught up with Jack, I wanted to hear all about how he gets ready to interview day traders and investors and people who found success in the markets. I also wanted to hear how Jack had sustained his interest in a topic of over 30 years, because I can only imagine how difficult it is to find new angles and new ways to talk about the same ideas or the same topics and that’s one of the question I put to Jack in this week’s interview. 

I hope you enjoy my catch up with Jack all about his Market Wizards series of books. Do check them out even if you’re not interested in day trading because it’s great advice about risk management and, well, I suppose it’s starting your own business and going out on your own, which is helpful for creatives too who are considering quitting their day job. Also consider checking out the books because they’re a great read. If you did enjoy this week’s interview with Jack, please consider leaving a short review on iTunes because your reviews will help more listeners and readers hopefully find the show and potentially buy some of the Become a Writer Today books which helps support the growth of the podcast. Also, please consider sharing the show with another writer on Overcast, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening. 

Now, let’s go to this week’s interview with Jack Schwager. 

Interview

Bryan: Welcome to the show, Jack. 

Jack: Hey, thanks, Bryan. Appreciate it. 

Bryan: So, Jack, I love interviewing entrepreneurs who have covered different niches and really delve into a topic and help explain it to an everyday audience. So your books are all about day trading and I was talking to you before we started, I’m not a day trader but I learned a lot about risk management, which is helpful for running a business. Before we get into any of that, could you give listeners a flavor for who you are and what you do? 

Jack: You know, very sort of career wise, I spent most of my career as far as employment goes as a research director for major brokerage firms on the derivatives futures side. Last 20 years or so, I’ve sort of been independent, either working as a consultant or — and then all that time writing books, so that’s kind of a brief background. And, you know, Bryan, I would correct one thing. The books really aren’t — I wouldn’t call them about day traders. There were some people who were day traders but a lot of them were much longer term so it was really a mix of — on a time horizon, there’s really quite a mix, going anywhere from literally day trading to holding positions for years. 

Bryan: The first book was published in the mid-eighties. Is that right? 

Jack: Yeah, the first Market Wizards, my first book, which was an analytical book, was published in ’84. The first Market Wizards book came out in ’89. 

Bryan: In the book, for people who haven’t read it, you interview different types of investors, traders, speculators, hedge fund managers at length and then you kind of turn their interviews into lessons and takeaways, fairly detailed advice for readers. Where did you get the idea from? 

Jack: Gee, I don’t know. I don’t know where I originally had the idea. At the time, I was involved in markets myself as a research director and was trading on my own but I was a pretty terrible trader and I thought it was a good excuse to try to pick the minds of the best traders, you know, in the country and I thought it would be a fun project and I did it kind of for selfish reasons, I wanted to become better myself and so I think I killed two birds with one stone. And that step — so that was basically the genesis of the idea. 

Bryan: So I write a lot of nonfiction and I love interviewing people from different subject matters. It’s quite easy to reach out to people today because of Twitter and emails and social media so you can find these people quite easily. I imagine it was a bit more difficult when you wrote the first book. 

Jack: Yeah. I had a bit of luck there. So, I knew, in fact, maybe to answer your prior question, one of the motivations was I did know some traders who literally were the best traders probably in the world and that gave me, you know — now how do I know that? Successful people don’t appreciate generally how much of their success is due to luck so I believe, you know, in most cases, in any successful person, yes, they had some ability but they also had some fortune go their way. Now, in my case, I happened — the first job I got on Wall Street, the first job I got all together, first permanent job out of grad school, was an analyst position. The person leaving that position was a fella by the name of Michael Marcus. And he was cleaning out his desk I was coming in the first day, we chatted a little bit. He was leaving to become “a trader.” He was leaving his analyst mission to become a trader. He stayed in New York for a few years and we used to get together because we met at that point and so we got together for lunch every couple of weeks for a while and so I knew him. He went on then to join a firm called Commodities Corp, which has changed a lot since the early days. Back then, it was one of the first prop trading shops and I think he was their best trader ever. They gave him literally, I think some small amount of money, I don’t know if it was $100,000, or 20,000, but it wasn’t really a lot of money, but he eventually built it up into $80 million. And that was with them taking money out every year for expenses. So I knew him. He then, while he was in Commodities Corp, hired Bruce Kovner who became one of the world’s most famous traders, he founded Caxton Capital, which managed at some point probably tens of billions. And I knew him because through markets, so I knew a couple of these traders directly. Part of it was really luck. And through them, I also got traders I knew who gave me recommendations to other traders, and I did some research and came up with the subjects in the first book. 

Bryan: And when you were approaching subjects, that you had a relationship with Michael Marcus, did you find other subjects were agreeable to an interview or were they reticent or reluctant? 

Jack: So I was pretty lucky. I think on that first book, just about everybody agreed, including people like Kovner, who — I think, using those two people, I don’t think they ever gave an interview to anyone else ever. And in Kovner’s case, he made it almost a medal of honor that he wouldn’t give interviews to anybody. So, first thing he said to me when I came into his office, he said, “You’re probably wondering why I agreed to talk to you,” and he basically told me, I didn’t ask him, he told me, he said, “There’s so much stuff appearing about me in the press, which is not correct, I think I’ll give one interview on the record that I,” you know, he trusted me that I would do — I’d be honest, I wouldn’t try to blindside him or whatever. And that’s true. I was basically just trying to get the truth. I wasn’t trying to catch anybody. I was just trying to convey to people as best as I could. And he sort of trusted me to give an honest picture since he knew me to provide an honest portrayal. And so that’s how I got that interview. And, you know, there were — Marty Schwartz gave me an interview, he said — I think in his case he wanted his parents to see the interview so they’re all different motivations, but I was pretty lucky that I got these people to give me interviews. 

Bryan: Has that been the same today, like for example with your latest Market Wizards book, Unknown Market Wizards, were the interviewees also I’m so open to talking about their successes? 

Jack: For the most part. There was some hesitancy in some cases. These people in this latest book, pretty much, I mean, by definition, under the radar. I mean, that was the whole point. Nobody knows who they are and it’s all about some guy trading just on his own and, you know, not putting out any — you know, no Twitter accounts, no managing money, just build — just making millions trading their own account for a year. So not really many motivational circuits to agree but they, in most cases, at this point, almost — this sounds conceited to say, but it is true, everybody I asked for an interview or just about not only knows who I am but they’ve read my books. And in many cases, my books were the inspiration for them getting into the markets. So they almost feel an obligation because, you know, I was the catalyst to get them into this business which proved successful for them, that they’ll — plus, I guess, also, hey, you know, that’s the guy that I, you know, first learned from so they agree to do the books. Of course, when I say learned, that’s probably a bad word because they’re like a thousand times better at trading than I am, but at least they got the insights that I got from other traders. I was kind of the conveyor of that information. 

Bryan: So that you spent approximately 25 years writing Market Wizards books. How have you sustained your interest in the topic? Like that’s quite a long time to go and pick one topic and really go deep. 

Jack: Yeah, it’s actually over 30 years. So how do I sustain interest? Two things. One, the markets are always changing so the whole atmosphere, whole environment, the stories change, and the people are different. And I’m trying not only to convey what makes these people successful or how they made money in the markets with consistency, but I also try to capture a little bit of their voice, their personality. And they range. They range tremendously. They go from very shy to very, very brash then they can go from extreme left to extreme right politically. They’re just all different. And so, insofar as people are different and every interview is different, that’s not been a problem. And I have an interest in the markets and that hasn’t changed. And there have been, like I say, you talk about change, the market, we know, we’ve gone from my first Market Wizards book, the people who made their fortunes then did it pre-PC and we go from a world before PCs to a world now where you have supercomputers, everybody has a powerful PC, tremendous amount of data available to anybody. You’ve got hedge funds with a hundred math and physics quants working on the markets. So you go on to a completely different world, and that itself also helps keep the interest. 

Bryan: That’s something that struck me in the book when I was reading about trading in the 80s, how different it was back then with completely different tools and no social media. I think one of your interviewees in the latest book, he actually uses metrics on social media to inform his trades, which was quite striking. 

Jack: Yeah, and that was really unusual, Chris Camilo, and this is how — no matter how much experience you have, you never know what you don’t know. So I’ve been in the market since the beginning of the 70s so it’s been 50 years or whatever. And until I did this latest book, my thinking was, well, you could use fundamental analysis, which people are not familiar, basically just economics, statistics, numbers like that, whether it’s macro numbers about the economies of the world or it’s individual company earnings and stuff like that. Or you can use technical analysis, which is the price movement, whether it’s chart analysis or systematic analysis based on prices and I thought those were the two worlds. I mean, you could use either fundamentals or technical, or as many traders I interviewed, combine the two. But what else is there? And, amazingly, in this book, I found that one of the traders doesn’t use fundamentals, doesn’t use technical, and as you indicated, he uses social media. And this is something that never occurred to me that you could actually trade on nothing but social media, which is what he essentially does and he’s been very successful doing that. Just basically trying to see, for example, maybe it’ll make it clearer if we try an example, something like Lacroix national beverage corporation, the company. So he noticed, by following — he developed these systems, he programmed systems where he could see when chatter on, let’s say, Twitter was increasing about some particular subject so he would see all this chatter now all about Lacroix which was basically it’s just flavored seltzer and so he kind of thought that because he saw this happening — and this showed up way before it showed up in the earnings of the company so he’s like ahead of everybody else. And it was those type of insights he got from social media that he used to trade. And to me, that was kind of eye opening that there was another world beyond what I conceived. 

Bryan: So you said that the key idea of the latest book is to profile unknown market wizards, so people who wouldn’t be known in the trading community, but when you’re coming up with an angle for your book, is it something you come up with or does your publisher approach you and say, “Jack, we’d really love to hear about X?”

Jack: Oh, no, no, I basically come up with the idea and then I go to a publisher with it. And I usually write the book before going, since after the first couple of books, I knew that anything I write had to get published so I didn’t have to — I didn’t use — I normally would wanna have the book more or less well under way before I’d even bother going, you know, going to a publisher. And I have an agent so my agent would do that. No, so I come up with the ideas and I try to make it a little bit different. The book before — the previous book I had done with this interview summary format was hedge fund market, which is, hey, what’s the first I get away from hedge fund market, which is people trading in their own office and nobody knows about them. So it was a complete kind of change from the last book, in other words.

Bryan: Another thing that struck me in the book is the level of preparation that goes into your interviews and how long the interviews are. I can only imagine how much time you spend going through the transcripts. Could you describe like how you prepare for an interview with… 

Jack: Yeah, I don’t do a lot of preparation actually before the interview. The work, maybe 1 or 2 percent, you know, a few percent of the work is just preparing who am I gonna interview, knowing about them, few percent may be the actual interview, content. Most of it actually comes in extracting all the interviews, like, you know, the information I get on the interviews into the book. That’s where the bulk of the work is. And it’s not — I mean, I think people probably have a wrong concept of how it works. As you mentioned, interviews can be very long. In some cases, I’ve spent two days doing interviews. So they can range, sometimes in the very short end, maybe one or two hours, to the very long end to be maybe 12 to 15 hours. Now, 12 to 15, is a longer interview. You’re talking about 12 to 15 hours of recorded interview, that would be hundreds of pages by itself, probably a thousand pages plus. So, you have to really go through that and extract what is the essence of — what is the interesting stuff, what is the good stuff. So that’s where the work is. It’s just sitting there listening to the recording, “Oh, I’ll take this, I’ll take that,” and then putting it into a readable format. And often there’s also a lot of shuffling involved because the same subject may come in hour 2, hour 7, and hour 9 and it’s, you know, if you kind of do it that way, it’s very disjointed. We speak in ways that don’t translate well into readability. So to go from a verbal format, which has run-on sentences, incomplete thoughts, and all that, to a nice readable format takes a lot of work. So you try to use the exact words as far as you can but you basically have to do a lot of editing, and sometimes finish sentences because you knew what they were gonna say but they trailed off and started another sentence and things like that, and put it in in some sort of order. So that’s kind of what the process is like. And then it’s just a matter of multiple drafts until you get it into a smooth, readable form. 

Bryan: Are you working with a researcher or a transcriptionist who helps you collate the interviews? 

Jack: No. You know, my very first, in the very beginning, I did recordings and had somebody type them all up and I remember they’re sitting on some interviews, like 100, 200 pages for the interview, and then go through each page encircling the sections where it might have something that I wanted to do and then putting them into different sections of categories, you know, so that was the process I did early on. But, you know, once recoding and computers, PCs was more available, I then went to just basically listening to the recording, just keeping whatever was good, and then when I went through the whole recording and extracted everything I might wanna keep, then I started working with that to edit it, to remove some stuff, to move things around and so forth. So, no, but I’ve done it independently, not since the very first Market Wizards book that I had anybody actually typing up the interviews. 

Bryan: So does it take long to write a Market Wizards book? Or is it more getting the interviews and arranging the time and everyone’s…?

Jack: The least amount of time is probably getting the interviews and doing the interviews. The bulk, like I say, 90 percent plus of the work in a book is just this editing process. Yeah, people sometimes say, you know, “Hey, you’re a really great interviewer,” I’d say, “No, not really. I’m probably a mediocre interviewer, but I’m a really good editor.” Because I think if you took the transcripts themselves, they would be pretty dull. They would be pretty dull reading. And they would be not grammatically very accessible. Because none of us are very — it’s rare that I get an interview, and this includes me on the question side, I’m not one of these people either, but very rare do I get somebody who speaks so coherently that you can literally take what they say, boom. It’s an exception. And I’m talking about many times billion people, we don’t speak like we write and that’s the reason for that. 

Bryan: So some of your interviews tend to be quite longer in the books. I think in the latest book, the Richard Barge interview was a little bit longer than some of the other people that you profiled. So what do you do when you’re talking to somebody and they’re a bit reticent of the information or they’re uncomfortable with the process? 

Jack: I’ll give you a couple of examples here. I can think of, in New Market Wizards, an interview where I would ask, you know, the first hour or two, there was just nothing — and I can tell, when I’m doing the interview, I can tell, and this is, by the way, this is a currency trader who has been trading for decades called Bill Lipschitz and, at the time, he was trading for Salomon Brothers and he was literally trading — I don’t know if he had just left Salomon Brothers or he’s still with them, but he was literally trading billions of dollars, you know, that was position side, which at that time was huge, huge. So he was reticent at kind of revealing information and we talked for a couple of hours and nothing was going and it just was an evening, just order in like Chinese food or whatever, and then the recorder’s off and we’re eating and then he starts opening up. And so — but, anyway, after that, we went on and I went back another time, but it turns out everything that’s in that interview, nothing in the first couple of hours was usable. But after a while, as he got more comfortable, I started getting lots and lots of useful material. In fact, that was the first — usually the first interview I put, not always but usually, the first interview is the one I kind of liked the best, because I get the best stories or whatever, and he ended up being — he went from an interview which I thought, “Oh, no, this is gonna be like a dead bust,” to one which ended up, in my opinion, the best interview in the book. But it took a while. And sometimes, you can’t get past it. There was one interview I think also in New Market Wizards, a fellow called Gary Bielfeldt. Now this is kind of interesting. At the time, I was a research director and I would have to provide information to the firm what’s going on in the markets, and I kept on, like in the bond market, I kept on noticing, you know, you’d see like Morgan Stanley or Salomon are these big — was a buyer, you know, Salomon was a seller, whatever, you get to all these big names as buyers and sellers, and then you see this BLH, BLH was a buyer today, and I said, “Who the hell is BLH?” I find out BLH is one guy in Peoria. I said, “That’s a story,” you know? How does one guy in Peoria kind of moving thousands of bonds? And turns out this guy started out trading one or two corn contracts and just built and built and was very successful. But he was, in my mind, whenever I think of him, I think of Gary Cooper. He was just very stoic, very — wouldn’t talk — couldn’t get two words out of him and it was a really tough interview. At one point in the interview, he says there’s a poker analogy but he didn’t want to put it on paper, so why don’t you put it on tape? He said, “I don’t want to make it sound like I’m fine,” got him to agree to put it on tape and got something out of him, you know, that was something interesting. But that was the one chapter — first of all, it’s one of the shortest chapters, maybe the shortest chapter out of any book. And half of that chapter is my narrative because there’s so little of the interview that’s usable. But the story was so phenomenal, how this one guy grew to that size, that I just had to put it in. So it’s not always — you can’t always solve it if the subject is really a bad interview subject, there’s only so much you can do. 

Bryan: You touched on another interesting point about the poker story and how he was reluctant for you to put it on tape. Do your interviewees like to see the transcripts beforehand and edited for clarity or say, “I need you to take this out, Jack”? 

Jack: Yeah, that’s a great question. Actually, yes, they do but I kind of did this proactively, from the very beginning. Maybe in the beginning, they asked and I got into the habit, but from very early on, I started doing this proactively. The reason is this. I’m asking these people to kind of open up, to trust me, and I don’t want them self-censoring, so I always tell my interview subjects, “Look, I’m gonna let you see the interview before it’s published and you will have the right not to let me use it.” Sometimes, I’ve actually had people send me a one-page contract stating that, in most cases, they take me at my word, and I do that so they’re not self-censoring, and the other reason also I wanna make sure, I am trying — I do very heavy editing of the material that we talked about and I try to do it so it stays in their voice and it’s true to what they say and it’s as accurate as can be. So I also want to confirmation from them saying, you know, in most cases, they don’t have any changes. And in some cases, they’ll have minor changes. But that just confirms to me that I’ve done a good job capturing what they were saying to the extent that they don’t necessarily know that a lot of the text is not exactly the words, it’s basically what they were saying but maybe cleaned up grammatically and switched around and so forth. 

Bryan: You also write up a reflection or a kind of a summary of the interviewee’s approaches to trading at the end of each chapter. Does that take long to prepare? 

Jack: No. I mean, that’s just — part of it’s editing, part of it’s writing, and there, I’m trying to just get the — I go through, you know, as I go through the interview, I kind of jot down key points and then, at the end, I’m trying to summarize, basically, what is the essence of the interview. And it’s not always obvious. People will say to me, sometimes, people who’ve been in markets for many years, they read the book and they get more experience and they go back and they read the book a few years later, and they’re amazed that they got stuff they totally missed the first time and they go back and they read it years later and they get other stuff. It’s kind of funny that way, the material sort of provides more information the more the person gets experience. And so when I’m doing those, the person who read the chapter, even those exact same texts, may have missed some of the points or not fully appreciated what some of the points are, so I try to, at least from my vantage point, say everything that I can draw out at interview that I think is a useful lesson about how to trade and so forth. 

Bryan: Would you have any plans to cover some kind of new markets like cryptocurrencies in a future book? 

Jack: No, I kind of avoided crypto from the very beginning and that’s — maybe I’m an old fogy but I kind of — my gut feeling was that — I’m no expert on crypto, by any means, I know a lot less than most people, but I just felt it was kind of distasteful because I didn’t think it was real. I thought it might be just one these tool manias. I certainly felt comfortable saying that about a lot of these me too crypto, you know, most of them, so I think I — on previous interviews have been said, I think most of these cryptocurrencies will go to zero. But as far as some of the big ones, Bitcoin, Ethereum, I wasn’t sure, not only because they’ve gone up so much but really because while I thought they were built on air, to some extent, there was a use for them. Now, the use wasn’t very admirable but there was a use and the use was basically they provided a way to do transactions that were either illegal or whatever, you know, transaction you didn’t want anybody to know about and that provided kind of a — although I understand now it can be traceable, but it provided a way for people to try to get around recorded transactions. And since there was a use that it served, even though it’s not a very, very admirable use, but there was a use, and where there’s a use, there might be value. So I was a — I didn’t have an opinion whether Bitcoin, you know, whether Bitcoin would keep, you know, to up — also, Bitcoin, it has a scarcity in terms of there’s only a maximum amount of Bitcoins that can exist. So that plus the potential use made it something that maybe might be real and I wasn’t sure. But I think most of it is not and I think — and especially the NFT thing I think sort of seems ridiculous. And so I’ve been too skeptical about these being real markets and I’ve kind of avoided them. And, you know, I don’t have plans to go there. 

Bryan: You wrote the last book during the coronavirus pandemic. Do you have any plans to write another book or are you gonna take a break? 

Jack: I usually don’t write — I usually take about a six- or seven-year break between books. I have to get to a point where I want to do a book. And so, you know, there have been cases — where I’ve done books, like when I did Hedge Fund Market Wizards, I was working on another book which was a different type of book which was just purely, you know, not interviews, it was Market Sense and Nonsense. It was a book where I was just kind of using my soapbox to talk about all the misconceptions people have about markets and trading and investment and so forth. So that was a different type of book. And those, I actually worked on those kind of simultaneously and then put one out and the other one out within a year or two. But that is the exception. Typically, I’ll wait five, six, seven years, just I have to get inspired to do another book.

Bryan: Jack, where can people find more information about you or your books? 

Jack: Final words? Basically, I know, in my case, I kind of left my Wall Street job to kind of work from home 25 years ago so kind of certainly hinted at it and it worked out for me so I guess my wife did push me in that direction, I probably wouldn’t have had the guts to do it on my own, but it did work out. So, you know, maybe people who wanna try to do something on their own, maybe it’s worth giving it a try, it could work out very well. And, yeah, I’ll tell you, I’ll say this. Okay. I started out in this process thinking that I wanted to be a really good trader and I discovered that, no, you know, I’ve learned from my own books how to at least be net profitable in trading, but I’ve never been a good trader, in my assessment. And I learned I wasn’t good, that wasn’t really my skill. I did learn that — but I found that writing was something I enjoyed and what I was actually good at. So, I guess it’s important to find not something that you think you wanna do but something that you are good at and enjoy because I think, unless you’re good at something, it’s very hard to be happy doing it. And you don’t necessarily know what you’re good at. I found that by accident, or specifically one type of goal and I ended up, you know, by accident, in a completely different type of career and content that way.

Bryan: Yeah, actually, Jack, I think you’ve touched on why the books appeal to me. I mean, I’m not looking for specific day trading advice but there’s an origin story for each one of the interviewees that you always find fascinating because it’s such a different career choice to what most people do. 

Jack: Yeah. 

Bryan: So I meant to ask you, Jack, where can people go if they want to keep up to date with your work or read your books? Where would you send them? 

Jack: Yeah, just like, you know, I mean, easily — I have a website, which I really don’t do much with, you know, my own name, jackschwager.com. So the books are all on there, but you can also go to Amazon and just put in my name or put in Market Wizards and everything will be there. 

Bryan: Thank you, Jack. 

Jack: Okay, thank you.

(outro)

Bryan: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. If you did, please consider leaving a short review on the iTunes Store or sharing the show on Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you’re listening. More reviews, more ratings, and more shares will help more people find the Become a Writer Today Podcast. And did you know, for just a couple of dollars a month, you could become a Patreon for the show? Visit patreon.com/becomeawritertoday or look for the Support button in the show notes. Your support will help me record, produce, and publish more episodes each month. And if you become a Patreon, I’ll give you my writing books and discounts on writing software and on my writing courses.