We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful George Sirois. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with George below.

George, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

As an author, I believe – in this age where publishing opportunities are no longer restricted to the Big Five – that your stories have a chance to thrive beyond their first printing. You can start out as an indie author going the self-publishing route, then realize that you don’t have to stay on that road and reach out to a smaller press to give your book a chance for a new life and a new audience. That is what I have done with both of my series – The Excelsior Journey and From Parts Unknown – and I love that I have been able to witness these stories get better and better over the years.

As an audiobook narrator, I believe that books do not have to be read at the typical slow pace that so many of them have been over the years. There is something to be said for a faster pace and higher energy that makes listening to an audiobook a memorable and rewarding experience, and I love to bring that to my readers as well as my clients.

As a podcaster, I believe potential guests should not be limited to a basic few, and they should not always have to be well-known. We are at a time when men & women we loved and cherished have either died off or taken themselves out of the limelight due to their own actions, and that void needs to be filled with up-and-coming talent. That’s where podcasters like myself and my show Excelsior Journeys come in.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

To paraphrase Henry Hill, as far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a storyteller. I didn’t care how those stories would be told, as long as whatever was in my head could get out into the world.

I was introduced to the world of audiobooks when I was six years old and my parents got me the Star Wars read-along storybooks with the cassettes included. After listening to them and reading along, I also got the storybooks for E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, and more, and when my cousin asked to listen to them while undergoing chemotherapy, I instead recorded myself narrating the storybooks. It was such a fun experience for me that I knew they wouldn’t be the last ones I would produce.

I went from narrating other people’s stories to coming up with my own in 4th grade, when my friends and I passed the time between assignments to come up with our own characters inspired by Star Wars, TransFormers, Voltron, G.I.Joe, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. The characters never had much detail (of all the different storytelling methods, art was never a very good one for me), but it was fun to come up with stories that were little more than stealing different ideas from different television episodes or movies and mashing them together (I later labeled it “reverse fan-fiction” since I was incorporating original characters into familiar situations, instead of the other way around). The more detailed the stories and characters got, the more I would fill steno notebook pages with text instead of sketches.

During the summer before my junior year of high school in 1992, I was introduced to the legend of King Arthur through the 1981 John Boorman film Excalibur, and I immediately fell in love with it. And since I had wanted to create a new character for the universe that was started in grade school in 1985, the timing was perfect. I would create a god in human form, a legendary warrior that was a mix of Jesus Christ, King Arthur, and Optimus Prime, and I would name him the word that I had seen in comics, in films, and on the New York state flag: Excelsior.

I’m telling you all of this, and there are many more stories to tell about the development of these characters and these ventures I’ve gone in, because I could have very easily moved on to other things as I got older. But something about them told me to not give up on them, that they were sticking around in my head for a reason, and that I did truly have something here.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

In the spring of 1995, a quick viewing of a match on Saturday morning’s Wrestling Superstars prompted an idea while I was taking a walk. That idea sat in my head for three years while I tried to figure out how this story should be told. In 1998, I decided it would be a video game. The next year, I asked myself how it would look as a treatment for a screenplay, so I wrote it. I had so much fun writing it that I started working on the actual screenplay the next month, and that turned into over ten different drafts, including one that became an award winner for the NY Int’l Independent Film & Video Festival in July 2000.

The next year, in March of 2001, I decided to start writing a novelization of the screenplay, and it was finished in July 2002. I opted to self-publish this story, deferring to an agent’s recommendation since the story was for a very niche market. Nine years after its November 2002 launch as a self-published novel, I decided to rewrite it from scratch, adding so many more elements to the story that it no longer became anything like the 2002 novel. It was so much more, and much bigger, so I decided to turn it into a five-part miniseries.

That five-part miniseries is now with a publisher, and details are being discussed regarding how it will be released to the masses. They not only want to launch it as five separate stories, but they liked my idea about a companion board game and they believe it would work well as an interactive card game AND a video game.

I’m telling this story because this is the very definition of resilience. I refused to let this story go, and I refused to let it fester when it didn’t work in one format, and I tried multiple means to get this story out there. You have to do the same. This is the time – more than ever – when failed or underperforming projects can get another chance to strike as either a self-published / indie book or as a traditional book, released by a small press.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

Regarding my experiences as an audiobook narrator, my best source of new clients has been the writing community itself. Since the first step in my creative career has been as an author, there have been several local authors who knew I was getting into audiobook narrating, and it has been a wonderful experience working directly with these authors and delivering something that was worthy of their readers’ time. It also creates a very streamlined process by presenting my rates up front, offering samples, and letting them make the decision of whether or not my voice is the right one for their project.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.hesgotit.com
• Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/georgesirois
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/excelsiorbooks