Well, I was, my background was actually in advertising and marketing, and I was doing political marketing, so I was in a candidate for US Senate. I was in his office when I wrote my first book. I wrote it for fun, and that's where it started. There was. I wrote the book. People really liked it, and I had been marketing long enough that I knew I had a product that could sell that I should sell it. So I started to share it, and the books went viral. So I started. I started with 23 copies, that first book was called The Christmas Box and today I think it sold about eight million copies and it opened the door for my career, in publishing. The one thing that was really important I found as soon as, because my first book was self-published, it took a lot of marketing, and I approached the book the same way I approach writing a political campaign, except where people can vote more than once, which is then they can vote any day so that they had an advantage there. And so when I brought the book out after the publisher started offering me, trying to buy my book, offering me millions of dollars to purchase my first book. I thought I would just shut everything down, and my very wise agent said, "You should never stop marketing because they're writing hundreds of books and you want to keep a marketing machine that you created here to keep selling". So that's how I did, to this day. I still have a marketing machine. I market everyone in my 41 novels. Actually, my 41st novels, comes out in six weeks, and we just met yesterday with my people and got ready to release that.

My fall book. And so after I wrote my first book and it was a Christmas story, I didn't want to be typecasted. So I started to move away from that and, sales began to drop, and they were dropping to a point where I thought maybe I have one last book in me, so I'm gonna go back and write a Christmas story. And I wrote a book called Finding Noel and it was Huge. The first week they went back for an additional 100,000 copies. The book just absolutely exploded and so I decided I would, well I guess you dance with who brung you to the dance. So I decided to keep working on to write every year a Christmas story. I've also written a young adult's series called Michael Bay, which has been very, it's a number-one New York Times bestseller. It sold more than three million copies, doing very well, but I still continued to do a Christmas book every year, so finding Noel is, excuse me, Noel Letters is the name of this one, and that comes on October 27th, and so it's my normal audience. And so one thing I would really, really stress to those who want to be writers is that you need to understand the business of publishing, and it's really about building a platform. I can send out an email and move a book into best seller level within an hour, and that's because I spent years and years building, my following and capturing their names and email addresses and contact information. And, you don't want to reinvent the wheel every single time. So you need to look at as you, pick names as you're building something, you're building a following, you're building a small community, and so you need to approach it that way.

That's one of the most difficult parts. So I find that sometimes I don't even know what the book's about when I start it. I mean, I've never written the book that I thought it was. It always takes me in a different direction. So in the case of this book, I wanted to write about forgiveness. I wanted to write about something that I thought was powerful. So every book has a meaning. I love stories of redemption. And so the book that comes out this October, the Noel Letters. It's about a woman who is coming back to see her father, who she hasn't talked to for years. She's broken the relationship with her father. He has cancer. She's coming back to see him. But he dies before she gets back, and she finds herself in her old home and picking up the pieces and starting to learn who her father really was. So I think it's something that we can all relate to in a sense, to go back and discover ourselves through our past. And what she finds is that she's been living a lie. And so the book starts with I love the beginning of this book, it starts with something that my father taught me something as a youth that I'll never forget, something that's impacted how I see the world, that people spend far more time looking to confirm what they already believe then looking for truth, and this, I really wanted people to consider. A few people are looking for truth. Most people are just looking for something that will, confirm what they already believe. And so we get stuck in ridiculous mindsets and belief systems. And sometimes the shakier, it's like a ladder, the shakier the beliefs are, the harder we hold to it. And so this is about finding freedom through truth and the adage that truth will set you free. So I'm excited for this book, it's getting really good national reviews, and my wife read it, and she's a pretty tough critic. And she said, it's her favorite of my books, so I'm excited for this one.