On this episode of Author Hour, gym owner and former schoolteacher Carrie Cox joins us to talk about her new book, The Self-Care Dare: 25 Habits for Lasting Wellness. What started as daily text messages to members of her Crew Fitness challenge grew into emails, blog posts, and finally a book built around five factors of wellness: mindset, nutrition, fitness, sleep, and connection. Carrie explains why going hard every day is the biggest misconception in fitness, why consistency matters more than choosing the perfect program, why strong connections may matter as much as diet and exercise, and how small, layered habits add up to lasting change. She also shares the writing advice she still follows from her high school speech teacher, why she insisted on writing in the first person plural, and her advice for anyone with a book inside them: just start.

For more information on Carrie Cox, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/carrie-cox

For more information on The Self-Care Dare, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/the-self-care-dare

After more than 30 years leading stores for some of America's biggest brands, Ron Thurston realized no one had ever written a book for the 55 million people who work in retail. So he wrote one. Retail Pride: The Guide to Celebrating Your Accidental Career came out in 2020 and still sells around the world. His second book, Human Pride: Optimizing Your Human Potential in a Digital Job Market, followed in 2025 as AI started to crowd people out of the conversation.

In this episode of Author Hour, Ron joins Scribe CEO Travis Stoliker for his third appearance on the show. He lays out his playbook for going from free talks and book giveaways to a represented, paid speaking business: how to ask about budget before naming a fee, how to get bulk book purchases built into an event, and why you're really pitching an experience, not a speech. He also shares his book marketing routine (30 minutes a day on LinkedIn, an email list, and replying to every single message), why he's never handed his engagement off to an assistant or AI, what he tells self-published friends, and why he'd recommend Scribe after going through the process twice.

For more information on Ron Thurston, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/ron-thurston

For more information on Retail Pride, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/retail-pride

For more information on Human Pride, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/human-pride

Rock Your Business: Navigating the Road from $50 Million to $500 Million and Beyond is the offensive follow-up to Rock the Recession, the 2019 book Autobahn Consultants founder Jonathan Slane co-wrote just months before the 2020 shutdown. Where the first book was about protecting a business in a downturn, this one gathers 21 voices from the Autobahn network, from a founder who sold to a Fortune 500 competitor to the former head of a Nike football division, to show business owners how to grow from $50 million to $500 million.

In this episode of Author Hour, co-author Brandon Pipkin joins Eric Jorgenson to explain how a book with 21 contributors actually comes together: co-authors interviewed together so they could challenge each other in real time, a single editor shaping it into one coherent voice, and a deliberate decision to skip an AI narrator so every co-author could read their own chapter of the audiobook. Brandon also walks through Autobahn's top-of-funnel playbook, including video boxes for prospects, handwritten notes to 100 VIPs, and a QR code that trades the free audiobook for an email. He closes with honest advice for anyone on the fence: write the book when you can't not write it, make a mess, and get it out of the drawer.

For more information on Rock Your Business, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/rock-your-business

What if you could market without marketing? After more than 30 years in marketing, advertising, and strategy, Scott A. Martin set out to solve that "unsolvable problem," and the answer became his book, Groundswell. Built around his formula of build, give, grow, transform, the book now sits at the center of everything Scott does: his consulting firm, his podcast, and his community all share the same name.

In this episode, Scott joins Scribe CEO Travis Stoliker to share a complete playbook for marketing a book. He explains why he turned his case studies into a "living book" community, how he uses signed copies, stickers, and a free meet-the-author call to build direct relationships with readers, and why he boosts his own podcast appearances as ads. He also shares the story of how a reader invited him to speak at TEDx, a talk that now has half a million views, and why he believes authors need to stop chasing attention and start building trust.

For more information on Scott A. Martin, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/scott-martin

For more information on Groundswell, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/groundswell

Julie Newman wrote Pull Don't Push to fix a message she had watched go wrong at more than 50 Girls in STEM events: well-meaning speakers telling girls they don't belong in STEM, then asking them to join anyway. Her book, written for the educators and outreach coordinators who shape kids' choices, makes the case for "pull" messaging instead, explaining what engineers actually do and why it's one of the most rewarding careers a young person can choose.

In this episode of Author Hour, Julie tells Eric Jorgenson how a single frustrating keynote became a book, why she was afraid educators would reject a message that told them they were doing something wrong, and why the opposite happened. She also shares the surprise payoff: the book paid for itself before it was published, landed her a salary increase of more than $60,000 in a single job change, and has helped her average a 15% raise every year since. Julie explains why writing a book with Scribe was better for her career than a master's, an MBA, or a PhD, and why you only need to be a few years ahead of someone to help them.

For more information on Julie Newman, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/julie-newman

For more information on Pull Don't Push, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/pull-dont-push

In 2018, Cesar Perez was on the rise. He had acted opposite Daniel Radcliffe in Beast of Burden, filmed with Clint Eastwood, and landed an audition for Venom. He never made it to that audition. On the drive to Savannah, a drunk driver hit him head-on, followed by a semi truck. What came next was five years in and out of hospitals, more than 30 procedures, a traumatic brain injury, and relearning how to breathe, eat, walk, and talk.

At his mom's suggestion, Cesar started journaling, typing with only his left hand. Those pages became Chase the Light: The Gruesome Art of Becoming Unbreakable, an Amazon bestseller in its first week. In this episode, Cesar joins Travis Stoliker to talk about how writing helped him heal, why he chose to own the rights to his story, how his book grew into a documentary and a feature film in development, and why he now spends his time being the light for others going through their own life-altering moments.

For more information on Cesar Perez, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/cesar-perez

For more information on Chase the Light, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/chase-the-light

Alec Roth grew up in Hollywood — the son of screenwriter Eric Roth, watching his father adapt books into films from a home office — and he’s now doing the same thing from his own side of the table. In this Author Hour conversation with Lex Statzer, Alec talks about what it actually takes to turn a book into a movie, why he believes “great intellectual property, your stories, they win the day, no matter what,” and how a Scribe author’s book landed on his desk and is now becoming a feature film.

That book is Candler Cook’s From Underdog to Bulldog, the true story of a walk-on’s improbable journey through big-time college football. Alec explains what made it “the modern Rudy,” why he was drawn to the passion baked into the material, and how he and Candler navigated the delicate work of adapting one person’s real story into a film — “I wanted to make sure that he felt he was telling the story he wants to tell.”

Along the way, Alec is candid about the parts of the creative life that every author will recognize: the doubt, the rejection, and the “soft yes” that never materializes. His advice is to believe in the material and keep going — “there’s no one you can’t reach out to.”

He’s especially bullish on books as the best raw material for film (“hundreds of pages… you get this world that you get to play off of”), and he closes with an open invitation: if you’re an author with a story, reach out — he’d love to read it and see if it belongs on the silver screen.

Cameron Herold never wanted to be an author. As he tells Travis Stoliker, his wife signed him up for a three-book package with Scribe as a birthday present — "You're doing three books with them over the next five years" — because she'd noticed that his first book was landing bigger speaking events and building his credibility. Seven books later (four with Scribe), Cameron has one of the clearest views in the series of what a book actually does for a business.

It isn't royalties. Cameron published to establish himself as a thought leader, then watched readers hire him to help implement the very ideas he'd given away for free — paying "$50,000 a year to coach them on the same content that's in the $25 book." His speaking fee climbed from about $3,000 an event before his first book to $40,000 for an in-person keynote today. He walks through the COO Alliance's book-as-lead-magnet funnel in hard numbers: hundreds of free copies mailed a week, an average client signing up within 62 days, a client lifetime value around $14,000. He describes putting his books on a banker's desk to get financed, and carrying three of them into his U.S. green-card interview as "a credibility play."

Cameron is just as sharp on quality and voice in the age of AI. He predicts most books will soon be read by an LLM summarizing them for a human — "adapt or die" — but he's adamant that the book itself has to sound like you. He tells the story of reading the first draft of Vivid Vision, calling it up and saying "this sucks, this does not sound like me," and Scribe rewriting the entire book until "it sounds like I'm literally saying it out loud to you right now. They got my voice down. They dialed it." He'd "rather write a hundred-page book that is absolutely me than a 220-page book that's filled with fluff."

Along the way: a full free-speaking playbook for new authors, the Simon Sinek story of the agency that passed because he didn't have a book yet, tributes to two friends he brought to Scribe, and a closing reminder that "the death rate is still a hundred percent. Let's enjoy the journey."

For more information on Cameron Herold and his books, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/cameron-herold