The stage was set for a big step in my self-publishing growth on Monday night in Atlanta. My foray with my wife, Melissa, and business partner, Mike Petchenik into the world of creating content around the premise of the exploding true crime genre has been interesting, time-consuming, and hopefully profitable.
It got me thinking about the life of an entrepreneur or media content person in Augusta, Georgia. Unless you’ve had a steady, focused, successful 31-year run as the anchorman of a local TV station, (congrats Richard Rogers on your well-deserved retirement) you are likely grinding out a living and always hustling like yours truly. ABD pays PART of the bills!
Sometimes, riches are not only gained with money. My “Trial Watchers” business partner, Mike Petchenik and I got the “celeb treatment” at the largest book festival in the Southeast. It’s humbling to be in the same lineup as “Kramer from Seinfeld,” ABC’s John Quinones, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and others.
The Atlanta Jewish Community Center was a great host and presented us with amazing gifts as a thank you for us showing our docuseries episode “Meet the Trial Watchers” and leading one of the book discussions with a WSB radio personality, Veronica Waters.
A bakery in Marietta, Georgia provided us with “Trial Watchers” cookies.
One of the headliners, Dr. Fauci, gave us hope as a book author. He spoke on Sunday night, prior to our event on Monday. His conversation with a former CNN Executive was amazing and even featured some political zingers just a few days prior to Donald J. Trump getting elected! As you may know, they disagreed on the severity of Covid and treatments.
Besides being a noted Public Health expert on Covid, HIV, West Nile Virus, and more—he’s also a shrewd businessman. Several times during his nearly 90-minute conversation, he repeated the words, “I write about this in my book.”
It worked as hundreds of people that night purchased, “On Call,” a memoir on his life and career. It was also standing room only to hear his talk.
Our crowd was decidedly smaller. Mike and I were able to autograph some copies that night. We will hopefully sell out our 75 books while the book festival continues for the next few weeks, though it’s likely we will return to hustle and sell another day!
To try to encourage readership of our $24.99 book and distribution of our podcasts, blogs, docuseries episodes, audio chapters, and more—we are offering the book as a gift to anyone who becomes a $10 a month member of the Trial Watchers Crew! Visit www.trialwatchers.com and click on join the crew. (Sorry, once a mediapreneur…. always a mediapreneur.)
The overall entrepreneurial activities in Atlanta from Sunday to Tuesday were incredibly helpful to the big picture of growing the “Trial Watchers brand.”
Our meeting at the CBS station in Atlanta may yield the playback of our docuseries episodes much like it did on WJBF in Augusta in December.
Mike was able to build on our experience of providing Trial Watchers content to Dr. Phil’s Merit Street Media over the summer. He was hired as one of a handful of journalists providing election night coverage. I enjoyed helping him set up at the Secretary of State’s office in Atlanta before heading back to Augusta.
This “mediapreneur” journey started for me not long after I hired Mike for his first journalism job at WAGT in Augusta in 2001. It’s a full-circle moment from proud boss to proud business partner.
