The New York Times once reported that 81% of Americans feel they have a book in them. Whether you count yourself among those 81% or not, you’ll want to listen to this show.

Our guest for episode 139 of The Solopreneur Hour, who is making his second appearance on the show, is the uber-talented TV writer and novelist Dean Lorey. Dean and I chat about how his latest self-publishing venture came to be, the lessons he’s learned as a writer and how they apply to the life of other solopreneurs.

More About This Show

If you missed Dean’s first visit to the show, find out about more about his history here.

But to quickly recap, Dean is a Hollywood writer who has worked on such notable series as Arrested Development, The Crazy Ones, My Wife and Kids, among others.

In this edition of the show, we talked a bit about what it was like when he found out The Crazy Ones was cancelled. He says as a TV writer you always know it’s a possibility your show won’t get continued and it’s something you learn to live with…and, like any good solopreneur, you go for it anyway.

And when he’s not working on a TV set, he’s writing novels. His latest is the hilarious satire called Romance For Men. The premise is a story told from the perspective of a mountain man in wilds of Alaska named Jack IceFloe Jackson. Jack is pissed off that romance novels are written for women so he decides to pen his own version based on his experiences.

Keep in mind, Jack is a short, fat, balding man with a 6-incher (according to Dean and Jack’s Twitter profile). Hilarity ensues when Jack retells his tales of saving the world through his lovemaking exploits; every woman in the world wants him and, through some twist of fate (aka fiction), the Earth continues to be put in perilous scenarios that can only be salvaged by Jack’s sexual conquests.

As you might imagine, the book is uproariously funny and ridiculously filthy. In fact, Dean says it’s the filthiest thing he’s ever written and perhaps that has ever been written!

You'll also discover things like:

* Netflix: how they became a major player in the world of television

* What shows would he have loved to have written for?

* Who orgasms at the end of the audio version of his book?

* How to find a good publicist for your next launch of anything.

* The necessity of marketing your book and how it applies to your business.

* And lots more!

The origins of the book and its rise to self-publication are a tale in and of themselves. Dean originally began writing a book within a book: he cast himself as a fiction character who finds Jack’s book in a secondhand book store. This fictional Dean chases Jack all around trying to get the rights to the book so he can make a TV show about it. The original version of the book chronicled those exploits.

When Dean showed people what he had written, they all wanted to read the book that fictional Dean finds in the secondhand bookstore. There was such demand for that book that Dean decided to sit down and write it.

But it wasn’t written with any intention to publish it. It wasn’t until he again showed more people this second distillation of the book that he saw the potential for self-publishing.

In fact, one of the people he gave it to was Adam Reed who created Archer for FX. Adam loved it and convinced Dean to make an animated series pilot for FX, which is now in the works.

Dean says writing the book wasn’t the hardest part, as many people think. The hardest part is to make people aware of it. As a writer, you have to be thinking of how you’re going to write it but also how you’ll get the word out. The same goes for other solopreneur ventures: when you’re creating something, think about how you’ll create it but also how you’ll spread the word about it.