From Peter Pan to a $20,000 Book Tour: How Podcasting Opened the Right Doors

The Peter Pan Story Was Only the Beginning

I entered the Disney College Program in 2009 and took the job that was available: lifeguarding at Blizzard Beach. Friends there saw Disney’s casting notice for Terence, the dust-keeper from the Tinker Bell films, and insisted I audition because I looked like him.

I was intimidated, so I convinced myself I was not really going to audition. I was only going to ask whether Disney hired puppeteers. I had done competitive church puppetry as a kid, and professional puppeteering sounded incredible. By the time I reached anyone who could answer my question, I had signed in, learned and performed a dance combination, survived the first cut, put on a makeshift Terence costume, worked with a voice coach, and auditioned in character.

I got the role. Months later, after several internal auditions and even an accidental fitting for Pete from Pete’s Dragon, I was finally offered Peter Pan. The story is funny in retrospect, but it established a pattern that Lauren noticed throughout our conversation: sometimes I begin moving before I know precisely where the path leads. The willingness to enter the room creates possibilities that planning alone cannot.

I Put Everything I Had Into 750 Books

I had wanted to become some kind of story artist for as long as I could remember. When I was 17, I began making Billy the Dragon for my much younger brother, Tristan. At Disney, I kept working on the book during lunch breaks. Being surrounded by performers and other creative people mattered; they kept telling me the book needed to exist beyond my notebook.

Traditional publishing seemed to place too much of my future in somebody else’s hands. Self-publishing meant I could make the product, get in front of children, learn from their reactions, and keep changing the work until it connected. So I invested the $4,000 I had into a print run. A pallet containing 750 copies arrived and occupied a parking space. It took about an hour to carry everything into my apartment.

Then I had to face the problem I had not solved: I owned 750 books and had no idea how to sell them.

A man from my church named James Carbary took me to lunch and gave me wonderfully simple advice: I had a physical product, so I needed to get in front of the people it was for. That sent me to the glass doors of elementary schools. I literally knocked and introduced myself as a local children’s-book author who wanted to present to students.

Most attempts did not become school visits. But roughly one out of every ten visits got me face-to-face with the school librarian. When that happened, the conversation became dramatically easier. The librarian could meet me, see the book, and decide whether I was someone they wanted in front of their students.

I Stopped Chasing an Audience and Found Its Gatekeepers

That experience gave me the marketing realization that shaped everything after it. I did not need to somehow reach every child one at a time. I needed relationships with the people who could responsibly open the door to hundreds of children at once.

My audience was students and families. The consistent gatekeeper was the school librarian—also called the media specialist, depending on the state. One trusted decision-maker could give me a room containing 300 members of the audience my books were created for.

Once I understood that, my question changed. It was no longer, “How do I sell more children’s books?” It became, “How do I get meaningful face time with more media specialists?”

That distinction is central to content-based networking. Before building content, ask: Who can open the right door for the work I am trying to do? Then ask what kind of content those people would genuinely be proud to help create.

The Literacy Advocate Became My Relationship Engine

My first attempt at a podcast was called Books for Kids. It described my niche, but it attracted other children’s authors. Those relationships were valuable, yet other authors were not the people deciding who visited schools.

I renamed the show The Literacy Advocate. That name reflected the aspirational identity of the librarians and educators I wanted to interview. Inviting a media specialist onto a show called The Literacy Advocate communicated that I saw and respected what they were trying to accomplish.

Before recording, I used what I call point-of-view discovery. I would find an opinion, experience, or practice the guest cared deeply about—something their peers would find useful. Once we recorded, I could ask what, why, and how questions about that idea. The episode was not a commercial for my books. It was an honest conversation about the guest’s work.

Afterward, many guests naturally asked what they could do for me. I could explain that I was a children’s-book author and ask whether their school ever hosted authors. If they did not ask, I could mention my work without pretending the podcast had been about me.

The podcast created warm relationships with the exact people who could open doors. That is the power of content-based networking: creating something worthwhile together accelerates the journey from stranger to trusted acquaintance.

A Two-Minute Video Changed the Economics of My Tours

Getting school visits was not the same thing as building a sustainable career. I learned that if a visit happened near a school book fair, I could set up a table and reliably sell books to students who had just seen my presentation. The problem was that most schools held their fairs during the same two short periods each year.

I kept asking how to untether sales from the book-fair calendar. Eventually I created short hype videos for schools to play in every classroom before my arrival. The video introduced me as a larger-than-life visiting author and showed students how they could preorder a signed, illustrated copy.

When a school played the video, I averaged about $500 in book sales from the visit. The difficult part was persuading a busy school to distribute and show it.

The breakthrough was not a new video. It was a new frame. Instead of pleading with schools to complete a favor for me, I established a speaking fee and offered to waive it when the school completed a few promotional requirements—including confirming that every classroom had watched the video.

The underlying action stayed almost the same. The meaning changed. The librarian was no longer being asked to help me sell books; the school was being offered a clear way to receive something valuable without paying the speaking fee. Good marketing often works this way: understand the frame people believe they are in, decide what more useful frame should replace it, and build a believable bridge between the two.

How One Conference Led to a $20,000 Month

Once I understood gatekeepers, I looked for the gatekeepers of the gatekeepers. At that time, each state had a literacy association that organized a major annual conference for librarians and educators. I began interviewing literacy-event organizers on The Literacy Advocate.

I could then mention a legitimate technology session I had created about classroom podcasting and ask whether it might serve their conference. The session gave me a reason to stand in front of the exact professionals who regularly booked author visits.

In Arkansas, the organizers helped me arrange weeks of school visits before I arrived. At the conference, I shared the remaining dates when I would be in the state and invited librarians to schedule me. I spent about five weeks driving across Arkansas, presenting at schools and selling roughly $20,000 in books in about a month.

There was no official playbook that said a children’s author should start a podcast, interview event organizers, teach classroom podcasting, waive speaking fees in exchange for advance promotion, and build a statewide tour. Each piece emerged from a more practical question: what is preventing the next step, and who already has the trust or access that can solve it?

The Same Principle Created Dinosaur House

The pandemic erased the school-tour system I had spent years building. But the relationships and marketing instincts behind it remained useful.

Podcasting introduced me to B2B sales leader John Barrows, who had created a children’s book to explain sales and distinguish himself from the many experts writing conventional business books. He told me he had spent around $15,000 coordinating the project himself.

I saw the missing business: a company that could turn founders, industry leaders, and niche experts into the children’s-book authors of their space. I began asking entrepreneurs whether they wanted to create a meaningful book for the next generation. Early clients repeatedly told me I was charging too little, so I increased the price after each project until the feedback stopped at about $10,000.

That became Dinosaur House. Our team uses interviews to draw out a client’s ideas, stories, personality, and voice, then turns them into a professionally produced children’s book the client truly authors and owns.

Over time, I refined the positioning further. The strongest book is often not simply about the expert’s industry. It is about the world of the expert’s ideal audience. A podcast-growth expert, for example, might create a children’s book that helps independent podcasters explain their work to their kids. The book becomes meaningful because it enters the audience’s family life rather than merely advertising the expert.

How I Use a Podcast Without Turning It Into a Sales Pitch

Podcasting also helped me meet the ideal clients for Dinosaur House: successful business owners who were parents, made thought-leadership content, and cared about legacy. But I did not want every interview to become a concealed sales call.

My approach was to make sure guests naturally understood what I did before we recorded. Then, near the end of an interview, I could ask a playful but revealing question: “If you or your business ever made a children’s book, what would it be about?”

If the guest simply enjoyed answering, the question stayed part of the episode. If the guest said they genuinely wanted to create that book, they already knew Dinosaur House was the work I did. They were choosing to raise their hand for another conversation. I only sold to people who did that.

I have also felt increasingly convicted that podcasting should not exist only to put potential clients in front of me. A relationship engine becomes corrosive when the relationship is merely camouflage. The content has to be worth making, the guest has to be worth knowing, and the conversation has to matter even if no sale follows.

The Real Through Line: Think Deeply About People

Lauren noticed something during our interview that I had not articulated as clearly: every apparent pivot in my career required me to think deeply about the person I was trying to reach.

I had to understand what librarians valued, how they saw themselves, what made an author visit easy to approve, why a principal would show a video, what literacy organizers wanted for their conference, what children needed before they became excited about buying a signed book, and what kind of legacy an entrepreneur wanted to share with a family.

That does not mean manipulating people into doing what I want. It means refusing to treat an audience, gatekeeper, guest, or client as an abstract conversion. It means finding an outcome that is genuinely valuable to them and making that value easy to recognize.

Lauren summarized our conversation with lessons about refusing to accept the official route, identifying door-openers, solving for flow before monetization, creating content around someone’s aspirational identity, and spending far more time thinking about the audience. I would add one more: begin before you feel fully prepared. I only went to that first Disney audition to ask about puppets. Sometimes the next part of the story is waiting inside a room you are still trying to talk yourself into entering.