We recently connected with Jody Sperling and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jody thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

I left my W-2 in 2021 to go full-time with my podcast and my writing. Over the previous 5 years, I’d had good fortune and a well-paying job, so leaving employment, I had savings to live on for about three years.

We owned four rental houses that had very little mortgage on them, so most of the rent was income for the family. Once our savings dwindled, we were prepared to sell the rental properties to lengthen our income further. My wife stayed home with the kids, so the plan was to treat my move as a new job, and my hope was to replace my income through podcast revenue and book sales.

For context, I’d never recorded a podcast, and I had zero published novels. What I did have was an abundance of optimism and a literary agent. It’s safe to call this point in my life one massive risk.

I didn’t dive in blind, though ignorance existed in abundance in my perspective. We expected hardship, but as you might guess, after about two and a half years, life has presented enough of the unexpected that we had to adapt. Having sold two of our four rental houses and still feeling a ways from financial stability, we chose to pivot. This past October, my wife returned to the workforce for the first time in a decade as I continue to build my podcast and book sales.

Though it may look like failure to those on the outside peering in, the risk we took as a family, the risk I took to leave safe employment, has been a massive success, and I’m so glad I embarked on the adventure.

Today, I have four published novels and one small volume on marketing. I sell hundreds of books a month, and my podcast generates thousands in revenue each month. If all this were possible without expenses, we could manage. However, we’re in aggressive growth mode now and for the foreseeable future, so every dollar I pull out of the podcast and from book sales goes back into expenses to build this thing I’m doing.

For anybody considering the crazy jump-out-of-a-plane-and-build-a-parachute-as-you-fall method, I have nothing but good things to say. Some days it’s painful. Many days, I’m embarrassed to be “that guy”. My grandmother has called me a Molly Homemaker, and the favorite identifier for me in the small town I live in is “Stay at Home Dad.”

I would say that for anyone considering a risk, know you’ll be surrounded by jealousy, and that that jealousy will manifest in others’ treatment of you. While you have to bear up under the weight of judgment, I never encourage a thick skin. Thick skin only numbs the pain. Instead, strive for a clear head. Know where you’re going, what you’ll sacrifice to get there, and be able to hear even painful truth in criticism. Use that truth to pivot when needed and improve where weak. Things won’t go according to plan, but if you can manage to press on and not quit, your risk will pay off.

Jody, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Like many artists, I began my journey because of a love interest. She loved reading and often spoke of her admiration for writers. Wanting to win her heart, I took up writing, using the formula I’d heard her encourage: write fifteen minutes a day.

My writing took the form of a journal, and I filled dozens of Mead Composition Notebooks over six years. During that time, I dabbled in fiction but mostly stuck to dramatic, emotional retellings of how the love interest and I were on-again, off-again. Woe was me, my broken heart.

When I was twenty, the love interest left for good. Rather than quitting writing, I got serious about developing my craft. Shortly before my twenty-second birthday, I discovered colleges offered Fine Arts degrees and enrolled to learn the skill formally. Another six years passed, and I emerged from Academia with a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction and a drawer full of published and unpublished works, mostly short stories but also a couple of novels.

Over the intervening decade, I’ve written numerous other novels, attracted a literary agent, and earned the interest of a publisher. However, the publisher wanted to print my debut novel in the summer of 2025. Their official offer came to me in the fall of 2022. Though I’d heard traditional publishers moved slowly, I felt the waiting game could only hurt me, so I fired my agent and self-published.

In January of 2022, I started my podcast, TRBM (formerly The Reluctant Book Marketer). Over the past 200 episodes, I’ve catalogued my journey to publish, market, and sell my books. I’ve interviewed dozens of creatives who’ve succeeded in earning a living from their writing, people such as Brad Listi, Andy J. Pizza, Steven James, Steven Pressfield, Joanna Penn, and many others.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

Self-publishing is the best way to build a readership, and though it’s still considered by some an inferior avenue to the traditional publisher, I wish I’d self-published right out of college with my first novel. In those days, you made money just for being on Kindle.

Now you have to advertise, promote, and hustle. But even with all the work required, self-publishing is the way to go. You can earn a living doing the work you love. To have that kind of outcome in the traditional publishing industry, you need to be selling hundreds of thousands of copies, and pump out new books every ten or eleven months.

The best part is, if you see consistent sales as a self-published author, you can negotiate for a traditional contract, if that matters to you.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

The War of Art – Steven Pressfield: There’s no better book for developing mindset. Combat Resistance and be a professional. 100M Offers/Leads – Alex Hormozi: I’ve reread both many times. They have inspired me to so much more success and sparked so many good ideas, they’re indispensable.
Train Dreams – Denis Johnson: It’s a novella about a man who loses his wife and daughter. The beauty, the aching, the resilience, the determination. It’s a book to make you remember why we live, the core reasons, not money or fame, but about relationships and to be loved and to give love.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jodyjsperling.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jodyjsperling/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TRBM22/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodyjsperling/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jodyjsperling
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC03fLkkjW2B3pU4-Lt0TWSA
• Other: Podcast: https://jodyjsperling.substack.com/ Book: https://jodys.substack.com/

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