Change of Luck: Not My Fault - Ken Saik
Author Ken Saik, the author of nine books and a retired high school social studies teacher, turns to write poetry, stories, and novels to entertain and explore individuals’ personal struggles. His work uncovers motives hidden by many people in hopes of creating an understanding, if not acceptance, of others who are misunderstood
Transcript
Okay, I'm recording.
Speaker:Hey everybody.
Speaker:Today we have Ken.
Speaker:Ken please introduce yourself.
Speaker:He is up little north of the border in Canada.
Speaker:So we got the time zone challenge last week, but we got it together this week.
Speaker:And Ken, please introduce yourself.
Speaker:I guess the best way of seeing it, there are probably two main characteristics of.
Speaker:One is at heart.
Speaker:I'm a teacher, Been a teacher for 31 years.
Speaker:Senior high.
Speaker:Junior high.
Speaker:Senior high for about 90% of the year.
Speaker:And probably you could say social studies was the major area that I taught in,
Speaker:even though my love was actually in.
Speaker:I did teach some English and it, it was probably the most fun when I had
Speaker:the freedom to be able to engage the students into doing creative writing.
Speaker:That is my second major element or characteristic, and that
Speaker:is that I love to write.
Speaker:Now I love to write stories.
Speaker:I love to write poems, and I am told that I'm actually a pretty good narrator.
Speaker:I've actually taken a course on how to do an audiobook and I've passed it.
Speaker:I just haven't done it.
Speaker:I've got
Speaker:Gotta get your name out there.
Speaker:That's about the size of it.
Speaker:But I just went to a conference about two weeks ago and one of the
Speaker:opportunities that we had was to pick a couple of short selections
Speaker:and shared with the audience.
Speaker:And I had my little opportunity.
Speaker:I got a huge round of applause and compliments from a whole lot of people
Speaker:and they said, You really have to get into doing your audiobooks because we enjoy
Speaker:how you were, how you speak, how you read.
Speaker:So that would be number three, . That's right.
Speaker:I call it work in progress narrator.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:. Excellent.
Speaker:Excellent.
Speaker:So tell us about your latest book, and if you want, tell us about some
Speaker:of the other books you've done.
Speaker:You've written quite a few actually.
Speaker:I went on your.
Speaker:And you have a few out there.
Speaker:So please go ahead and indulge us.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Since you said the latest the latest book I have done was called
Speaker:In the End, and it's a young adult book basically an adventure book.
Speaker:And I guess it was inspired by, call it the conversations that were taking place
Speaker:during Covid and in particular a lot of people concerned and worried that.
Speaker:We're losing our people.
Speaker:We're losing our friends.
Speaker:And what happens to you when you die?
Speaker:I don't wanna die.
Speaker:Yeah, that's definitely understandable.
Speaker:Neither do I , right?
Speaker:Is there anything you can really do about it?
Speaker:And so that's what in the end is about 12 young guys having a party in the garage.
Speaker:It's their man cave.
Speaker:And it's been storming for the last three days and the garage drops into a sink.
Speaker:Now before they get a chance to drown at the bottom, they manage
Speaker:to crawl out of the garage and into a little cave that's actually a
Speaker:mouth for a whole maze of tunnels.
Speaker:Now they gotta try and see if they can actually get out of there.
Speaker:All they got is flashlights, lanterns, and a little bit of food and water.
Speaker:So they don't have a lot of time, but they have no clue how to go
Speaker:around, where to go and whatever.
Speaker:Anyway the I'm quite pleased with a number of the
Speaker:reviews that I've gotten on it.
Speaker:Probably the one that I enjoy seeing the most is people not only say an
Speaker:ending I never would've expected.
Speaker:But after having read the end, they have to go back through it and read
Speaker:it again to see how it all came about.
Speaker:I think.
Speaker:So how do you get your characters?
Speaker:That's a really funny one.
Speaker:12 characters.
Speaker:How do you come up with a character, a profile for each one?
Speaker:And I thought that would be tough.
Speaker:So I made it easy in myself.
Speaker:I said, I'm just gonna go to the astrological sciences, see what
Speaker:they've got there, and use that as a base to work from, modify it as the
Speaker:character interact with each other.
Speaker:But that was the.
Speaker:Now, do you, do your books take place in Canada or all over the
Speaker:place, or anywhere in particular?
Speaker:Mostly I would say in Canada, simply because that's what I'm familiar with.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:But the books that I wrote is called Old Country Surprises and the majority
Speaker:of the setting in that one is in Ukraine.
Speaker:It's based upon a grandfather who is concerned that his grandson isn't
Speaker:really picking up the culture and the heritage like he'd like, so
Speaker:his thinking is, how about if I ask him to go to the old country and
Speaker:research my grandfather's birthplace?
Speaker:And in the process it collect a lot of stories from those older people.
Speaker:He's thinking in that type, they'll get an idea of who Ukrainians really.
Speaker:So the grandson goes, and, because I had actually taken a bus tour off Ukraine for
Speaker:two and a half weeks and was thrilled with it so much, was that because of family
Speaker:or just interested in the country or.
Speaker:My heritage is actually Ukrainian.
Speaker:And I'm actually, I say I'm a poor Ukrainian because I really
Speaker:haven't mastered the language.
Speaker:It was not something my parents wanted to advertise at the Ukrainian.
Speaker:It was not popular culture.
Speaker:If you really know the Ukrainian history, particularly in Canada,
Speaker:in in, in, in World War I.
Speaker:When we were at war, we were at war with the German countries.
Speaker:Now, at that time, Ukraine didn't exist.
Speaker:It was part of a gala, Glacier, part of Austrian.
Speaker:So if you had that Ukrainian kind of connection, you weren't seen as Ukrainian.
Speaker:You were seen as Austrian, German, the enemy.
Speaker:you weren't that kinda person who wanted to.
Speaker:Let everybody else know who you were.
Speaker:So consequently I say I'm a poor Ukrainian in the sense that I have I
Speaker:think the best way to call it is called a private understanding of the Ukrainian
Speaker:culture, but not such a public one.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:That's where my main character was, too.
Speaker:. I hope he got out.
Speaker:So that's interesting.
Speaker:So are you self-published?
Speaker:Do you have a publisher?
Speaker:Did you do both?
Speaker:What and what was your, the process like?
Speaker:I've worked through a couple of publishers, actually.
Speaker:I started off just telling stories.
Speaker:Told a story in, in, in a busload of kids and adults who were on a tour.
Speaker:The kids were all rambunctious.
Speaker:And did you get any of your ideas from the kids in school?
Speaker:Oh, I got one of those too.
Speaker:, I bet on that particular point, as a teacher, I'm supervising the.
Speaker:There's a bunch of girls talking and they're talking about how easy it is to
Speaker:be faithful to your boyfriend, Uhhuh.
Speaker:As a teacher, you gotta get them to look at the other side.
Speaker:So I says what kind of things might happen for someone to start turning
Speaker:their eyes away from their boyfriend and ask gimme a whole bunch of ideas.
Speaker:And over a course of a month or two that they kept doing that and
Speaker:they said what do you want this.
Speaker:I says someday I'm gonna write a book and I'm gonna use the ideas that you gave me.
Speaker:awesome.
Speaker:They didn't want any money, did they?
Speaker:I was gonna do it either
Speaker:So talk about your publishing experience.
Speaker:I was saying that the I told that story in the bus and the people in
Speaker:the bus, You should write this up.
Speaker:So one time while I was in the holidays, I wrote, Okay, so you've written it, but
Speaker:I'm not looking at publishing it and I just kinda shared things on fan story.com
Speaker:or whether stories or poems or whatever.
Speaker:And along the side is a little lub saying would you like to know what
Speaker:it takes to become a publisher?
Speaker:Okay, fine.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:I'm curious.
Speaker:It was really an advertising for a publishing company.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:And yeah they got in touch with me and they encouraged me
Speaker:and, okay, I've got this thing already done, so we'll submit it.
Speaker:And they were really very encouraging and very helpful, and I thought,
Speaker:Ooh, that sounds interesting.
Speaker:So I ended up publishing my first book like that, and because I was
Speaker:so please about that, because I had this other one about the the
Speaker:lunch girls story, I went and put that together and did that one too.
Speaker:So that's how I got into it.
Speaker:But, I was a little concerned.
Speaker:This is American company and I wanted to get my books in the bookstores in Canada,
Speaker:and they didn't really have any contacts.
Speaker:So I found another one again along that fan story.com one, and hey,
Speaker:they can get the books into chapters.
Speaker:Hey, I'm switching.
Speaker:Switching to this publisher.
Speaker:So for old prizes, that's what I had done.
Speaker:And so that kind of worked.
Speaker:What I ended up finding out is there was a cost to be able to have those connections.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:I can I can do book signings in my city and I can get the books put in
Speaker:there and it doesn't cost me a cent.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Okay, fine.
Speaker:I'll just go that way.
Speaker:. Yeah.
Speaker:That's a, as I tell folks, That if you look at writing the book, the writing
Speaker:the book seems to be the easy part.
Speaker:It's marketing and getting it out there is really the challenge, especially if
Speaker:you're a new author or depending on where you live, what you're writing about.
Speaker:So I think that's the biggest challenge, is the marketing aspect of it.
Speaker:I would agree.
Speaker:And I was, I would say for.
Speaker:Probably most of my writing time, I was ignorant of being an author.
Speaker:Author, as in that's a business and business.
Speaker:It is.
Speaker:It's a job.
Speaker:. Yeah.
Speaker:And so for the longest time, I really wasn't too clued in about what to do
Speaker:and how to do, how to launch a book.
Speaker:Did you even launch a book?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So yeah, that's probably a learning curve.
Speaker:That started about two, maybe three years ago.
Speaker:And I'm still learning, and I haven't, I can't say that I'm a master
Speaker:at it, but I do have social media outlets Facebook being my main one.
Speaker:Only in the last, call it three, maybe four months.
Speaker:Both the publisher and my webmaster said you should put things on social media.
Speaker:You should put things on Facebook.
Speaker:We'll pay someone to do.
Speaker:I looked at some of the things that some of the paid ones were supposed to do.
Speaker:Hire me, I'll do this.
Speaker:I said, I can do a heck, a lot better job than that.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I found out there are a tenant experts in the world and there can't everybody claim
Speaker:to be an expert, but there can't be that many, You know what I'm There just can't
Speaker:be . They may be experts in a certain part, but for example, one of the things
Speaker:they don't know is they don't know your.
Speaker:Can, you know the cute little things in there that you want to introduce, and
Speaker:then you can incorporate that into your posts, but they don't know that they don't
Speaker:have the time to go ahead and read it.
Speaker:So as an author, you're much better off to do it yourself.
Speaker:Yeah, I found that I'm not a big or wasn't a big Facebook
Speaker:fan, but I just do it now.
Speaker:Just be able to get some of the word out and Yep.
Speaker:LinkedIn, I'm pretty heavily involved in Twitter.
Speaker:Little bit more.
Speaker:Than I was, but just because of the aspect of getting the book out, honestly.
Speaker:And I found that there's, they each have a different value.
Speaker:Like the Facebook is good just to have an awareness of the
Speaker:book and what's going out.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:use Canva for kind of creating the posts, which is really a good, I've
Speaker:found a really good app to work with.
Speaker:Canvas Cava.
Speaker:Cava.
Speaker:Oh, how do you spell that?
Speaker:D a N V.
Speaker:You get to create all kinds of, They have templates and they have
Speaker:where you can start off on your own.
Speaker:They even have a scheduler that works out well for just putting things on Facebook.
Speaker:Oh, so you can prearrange and take a few hours a day and just knock
Speaker:it out for the next week or two.
Speaker:That's found that 95% of all the authors that have interviewed.
Speaker:Have jobs,
Speaker:and writing and everything sometimes was something that they really
Speaker:enjoy or did enjoy when they were younger or getting back into it.
Speaker:But they have careers that they're more concentrated on.
Speaker:So you really gotta be able to maximize your time.
Speaker:And when you could write, how long does it take you to write up
Speaker:one of your books, do you think?
Speaker:I don't really know.
Speaker:I guess it just depends on what I do.
Speaker:The first book that I wrote, I actually did in a week.
Speaker:That was a very short one.
Speaker:It was less than 10,000 words.
Speaker:And the second one was probably more along the line of a month.
Speaker:But then talking about somebody who is just new at doing their work and
Speaker:they're not necessarily, we'll say an expert at the writing, but it's just.
Speaker:I'm I'm with you on that.
Speaker:I know that, So I I finished my first novel in six weeks, Uhhuh, about
Speaker:80 some thousand words, and I just finished my second novel, had 92,000.
Speaker:I, so I've done two books in eight months, Uhhuh and I
Speaker:personally, I'm not working.
Speaker:So I can able to do that.
Speaker:But I go through and I find as my write, as I continue my
Speaker:writing is getting better.
Speaker:The books are the books seem to be getting better, even though the
Speaker:first one, I really love this one.
Speaker:I do too.
Speaker:So I'm branding things in the, because I wanna do like a series.
Speaker:So I'm branding it.
Speaker:Got some plans around that.
Speaker:And That's critical also.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I know one.
Speaker:It's called Baggage Bird.
Speaker:It's a pretty large book, but it's based upon a woman who I saw as very
Speaker:intelligent and very attractive.
Speaker:She was very much with kids.
Speaker:She just didn't wanna have anything like she did trust them.
Speaker:Eventually found out why, and so I had to tell her story.
Speaker:That took eight.
Speaker:It was one that, my goodness, it was that hard to be able to put in the kind of
Speaker:things that she did and as nice person, but she knew how to turn people off so
Speaker:easily and she was comfortable with that.
Speaker:Now, all your books are fiction, right?
Speaker:Or are they all, Some looked like me.
Speaker:They weren't fiction.
Speaker:Fiction, but they're based upon say real.
Speaker:The example of that baggage burdens one some of the realities that is based on
Speaker:besides what this woman's life was like.
Speaker:Is stories I heard from people who came from alcohol anonymous.
Speaker:Now I was a teacher teaching sociology and one of the things that the kids love to
Speaker:hear about is, And the problem with that.
Speaker:And so that opened the door for bringing people in from Alcohol Anonymous and alau
Speaker:and that kind of thing, so they could, so a lot of the stories that I I
Speaker:pick up and incorporate there comes from what I heard from them or even worse.
Speaker:Once the kids knew that I had an understanding and an acceptance of that
Speaker:kind of situation, then they start coming to you and telling you their story.
Speaker:That was disturbing.
Speaker:So again, it could be, that could be very disturbing.
Speaker:I But then you do with what do you do with the information.
Speaker:But I think of my writing as realistic fiction.
Speaker:Ok.
Speaker:That's what I kinda, my claim is, I think,
Speaker:So when you write and you publish and you market what kind of advice
Speaker:would you give aspiring authors or heck authors that have established authors that
Speaker:you would either change or do or redo?
Speaker:What kind of advice would you give?
Speaker:You got quite a collection of books that you've written, so
Speaker:you've been very successful at it.
Speaker:I'll say there's a couple of things that I would say I wish I
Speaker:would've known earlier that ends up improving the quality of my work.
Speaker:Probably one of the best is that you're in contact with a group of other authors
Speaker:who are comfortable in being beta readers.
Speaker:Now I, I've had a couple of them who were, every week we
Speaker:would share a chapter with each.
Speaker:And we would then comment on it and it was all the way across anything.
Speaker:And we pulled no punches.
Speaker:How could you make this better?
Speaker:How does this come across?
Speaker:Is this really realistic?
Speaker:What might instead?
Speaker:And so as a result of that kind of feedback, you end up having a
Speaker:better quality piece of work, right?
Speaker:And.
Speaker:That to me is really a good thing to do and try and find people that you can
Speaker:connect with like that, and once you do, hang on to 'em because they're valuable.
Speaker:Yeah, I would agree.
Speaker:I started having people.
Speaker:The first book I did, cuz I didn't you'd wanna keep that your
Speaker:work tight to your chest, right?
Speaker:You don't wanna, Oh, if this gets out you gotta be somewhat paranoid.
Speaker:But then on this one I said I had my brothers, Hey man,
Speaker:why don't you check this out?
Speaker:Cause he read the first one and he so far, so good on this one.
Speaker:Then I'll see what I do after that.
Speaker:But I'm not too worried, at least, I guess maybe because you
Speaker:will say, the people that I know are writers in their own right.
Speaker:And they write and they, because it's a different genre.
Speaker:I'm not worried about somebody picking up something else.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I just didn't know.
Speaker:I didn't know anybody.
Speaker:You hear so much about plagiarisms and ideas being stolen, like
Speaker:movies and things like that.
Speaker:But this one I just don't know.
Speaker:So I just kinda kept it under the wraps for a while.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:guess I think that for, I'm gonna say authors who were new, and I know this
Speaker:is it's new and I encounter that when I meet other authors at Linked.
Speaker:Is you really need to get reviews for your work on Amazon and it's, yes,
Speaker:you can get some good reviews, you can get paid reviews, and that's, I
Speaker:found that to be actually really good.
Speaker:I've got a couple of good sources for that, but what I really think
Speaker:is nice is if you can get other authors to do reviews for you, either
Speaker:as a beta reader or as post on.
Speaker:And one of the ways is when you find people who.
Speaker:In your same genre, you show an interest in theirs, offer to do a
Speaker:review for them, ask 'em would they be willingly to do one for you.
Speaker:And a lot of reciprocation, that's for sure.
Speaker:Kinda works so well that way.
Speaker:So that I would say is a really good thing to try and do, especially
Speaker:if you are something like me.
Speaker:You don't have an awful lot of money to burn . No.
Speaker:, no.
Speaker:So you gotta be very Diligent or with your money and your time.
Speaker:What about Good Reads?
Speaker:Do you do anything on Good reads?
Speaker:I'm following it, but I haven't put anything on it.
Speaker:I have people who have encouraged me to do that.
Speaker:I probably would, but my priority right now is I'm working through a book.
Speaker:It's a Kindle Villa.
Speaker:So redo a one and it's written different and it's chapter by chapter.
Speaker:And so I'm more or less going through the last part of the edited
Speaker:stuff I got from the publisher.
Speaker:And as soon as I get that done, my next step is to do the narrating for each one.
Speaker:Oh, very cool.
Speaker:So you can do it yourself.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Nobody, nothing better than being your own eat your own dog food.
Speaker:There's a saying in technology that if you build something that you
Speaker:should use, you should be using.
Speaker:If you don't, then you're not eating your own dog food.
Speaker:So why should people eat your dog food if you don't?
Speaker:Like they won't either.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:That's cool though.
Speaker:Good for you.
Speaker:One of my training.
Speaker:I've taken the course, I passed.
Speaker:I know I can do this, and I have a mentor who will work with me if
Speaker:I have troubles, which is really.
Speaker:, but you can also do some just by recording it off a, off an iPhone.
Speaker:And so the first part, just to feel comfortable doing it is I
Speaker:have flash stories And so I'll read those or I'll read poems and
Speaker:then I'll start sharing those.
Speaker:Maybe I'm gonna be sharing it on Facebook.
Speaker:I haven't done that, but I'm opening up a section on my.
Speaker:On my website and there will be a section where you can listen to those short
Speaker:stories, so it'll give somebody an idea.
Speaker:How does this guy read?
Speaker:I.
Speaker:My defiance press and publishing is my publisher.
Speaker:And when we're doing the audio book, he sent me like 25 people that addition
Speaker:for for the audio book I sat down, listened to him, narrow em down, but
Speaker:I got my wife and I wiener him down.
Speaker:And then my son and he looked big man.
Speaker:He goes, It sounds just like the people I work with.
Speaker:So I said, Okay this is the person that we're gonna go with on the book.
Speaker:There's, it's a lot.
Speaker:That's a lot to it.
Speaker:Spec on the narration, looking at figure out who is gonna
Speaker:do it, doesn't make sense.
Speaker:Even throughout the whole book on the different chapters, it sound good.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And when you have a, when you hire someone, yeah, it's a bit of a cost,
Speaker:but you know that they're going to do the technical stuff as well.
Speaker:But the good thing about this course that I took and that mentor that I.
Speaker:He teaches you how to go through, not only to do the reading, but
Speaker:how to go through the editing and making certain that it's going to
Speaker:pass when it goes on to something.
Speaker:Find a Way Voices or it goes on Amazon.
Speaker:Yeah, Amazon.
Speaker:That was a two month process for the book to be approved.
Speaker:To be put on Audible.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:And so it's not just here you go submit your thing.
Speaker:And they do it.
Speaker:They go through a linky process.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:I assume at different times of the year may be different, but I don't know,
Speaker:there's, I don't know how many books are put on Amazon every month, but there,
Speaker:there's millions of books out there.
Speaker:So you gotta do something to stand yours out.
Speaker:So where can people get ahold of you?
Speaker:Where can people get your books?
Speaker:And if they want a great voice for narration, how are they gonna do that?
Speaker:They're probably gonna wanna listen to my work first and then determine whether
Speaker:they think I'm actually that good.
Speaker:However I do have a website and it is www.authorkensake.com and on there
Speaker:you'll find all the books that I've done and you'll find that I actually have a
Speaker:blog site as well called Kingdom Builders.
Speaker:And I.
Speaker:Doing a lot of writing in that because I like to do other writing, if I do
Speaker:something once every two weeks, then you don't feel like you're gonna
Speaker:be overwhelmed with a whole bunch of emails that are coming in and
Speaker:I'm not being over the other way.
Speaker:Yeah, you can find all these books on on Amazon as well.
Speaker:I write in several different genres.
Speaker:One of 'em I mentioned in the end is a faith one, but it's also young.
Speaker:suspense mystery and if you like a little bit of fantasy mix the end of that.
Speaker:I've got a small series, three books.
Speaker:I'd mentioned that first one called A Change of Luck, but I've got two more
Speaker:that have followed along that line.
Speaker:And so you get to see how a special $100 bill that keeps coming back to you ends
Speaker:up putting the holder in so much trouble.
Speaker:They gotta figure out how to get rid of the stupid.
Speaker:Give it to me.
Speaker:I'd tell 'em not to get rid of it.
Speaker:the key is with a hundred dollar bill breaking in the twenties, in
Speaker:those twenties, go that's the key.
Speaker:That's the key.
Speaker:Break.
Speaker:A big bill in multiple bills, smaller bills and thing will go away.
Speaker:Snowflake in Texas in summer, it'll be gone.
Speaker:It doesn't happen that way in my book.
Speaker:Oh, that was cool.
Speaker:We have great, Ken, thanks.
Speaker:You also can link up with LinkedIn.
Speaker:Correct.
Speaker:Facebook and such.
Speaker:LinkedIn.
Speaker:Facebook is I put daily posts on there about my books from different
Speaker:kind of perspectives, so you really get a chance to get a flavor of
Speaker:the different things I write.
Speaker:That is great.
Speaker:That is great.
Speaker:Thanks for taking the time on a Saturday.
Speaker:To sit down with me and the listeners and talk about your books yourself.
Speaker:And I think there were some great points.
Speaker:I wrote some stuff down.
Speaker:That some great points you put out, that's for sure.
Speaker:Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker:It was my pleasure to be here.
Speaker:Ken, Thank you very much.
