Looking to Interview Bestselling Authors for The Publishing Profits Podcast

This pretty much fits me to perfection:

Really depressing / inspiring stories. Have you been homeless? Did your manuscript spontaneously combust in a glorious fireball? It would be awesome to hear a serious rags-to-riches story from someone who has been down in the dumps and pulled themselves out of it with their writing.

Here's the book description to give you a better idea:

In the bestselling tradition of Smashed and Glass Castle, this raw, eye-opening memoir tells the powerful story of Elizabeth Garrison's fractured childhood, descent into teenage drug addiction, and struggle to overcome nearly insurmountable odds. Elizabeth invites the reader behind the closed doors of a picture-perfect Christian family to reveal a dark, hidden world of child abuse, domestic violence, and chilling family secrets all performed in the name of God under the tyrannical rule of her father. Like countless teenage girls, Elizabeth turns to drugs and alcohol to escape. With smack-you-in-the-face honesty, Elizabeth chronicles the dark realities and real-life horrors of teenage drug abuse, living on the streets, foster homes, and treatment centers. She paints an unsparing portrait of scratching and clawing her way out of the grips of child abuse, addiction, and betrayal to find the strength within herself to save her own life.

-- I went from a homeless teenage drug addict to a person who now has a Ph.D. My area of specialization is in children and trauma. Specifically, my research for the last ten years has focused on using writing as a way of healing.

I'd love the opportunity to talk with you. Please feel free to IM me.

I'd be interested if you wanted to do a podcast of leveraging a self-hosted  wordpress as a nearly all-in-one publishing platform.

I use my wordpress as a writing space (with plugins for grammar, organizing posts into series, by category, using tags to drive organic search traffic to my site of readers who would want my book, mailing list sign up since after Chapter 5 readers must sign in to read so it collects their email addresses, distribute my review PDFs, get reader feedback as I write chapters, stay accountable to others to keep writing, and everything backs up with one click). Also, every post automatically posts to my social media, which isn't rock science, but I haven't met another author using wordpress the way I am.

By writing live since last summer, I've grown my releases to where the preorder of my latest novel has over 300 preorders in just 13 days at $8.24 each. My last preorder took 6 weeks to hit 500 and that was in December. My success I believe is a combination of niche readership + publishing often (because with wordpress, I rarely have to duplicate work) + staying in constant contact with my readers by writing live. 

Since last July when I restarted after a 3 year hiatus, I've published six titles, and sold 9,741 ebooks, 331 paperbacks, and I have another 332 preorders on the titles coming soon (Virtue of Marriage went preorder live feb 9 and has 310, An Autumn Accord preorder went live this afternoon to publish on thursday and has 22). I think the biggest departure, and it's not that doing a discount release is bad or anything like that, is that I did try out 99 cents for a count down deal on 2 books, only 209 copies of the nearly 10,000 ebooks sold for 99 cents. Everything else was regular price, $3.25 and up.

It's important to note that not ALL genres can support higher priced books, certainly, but there are still some out there that can.

It's also a different flavor of "going free" where I'm seeing 13% of my site's total unique users in a month registering, and many readers who read it free still go on to buy the book when it releases because they feel like they were a part of the process (and they were! without them, I probably would THINK a lot about writing books, but not actually, you know, write them). I do put an update on each post before the chapter, so there is value in visiting my site even if you don't want to keep reading along as a book is written past Chapter 4. Some of my readers have told me they don't read past that and just like to see the book is getting done, and like to read it on release day.