HS 177 – 2nd Amendment Rights and Self Publishing with Skip Coryell

Skip Coryell is the owner and President of White Feather Press. He’s a certified NRA Advanced Pistol Instructor and Chief Range Safety Officer and co-owner of Midwest Tactical Training. He’s also the Founder of the Second Amendment March. Coryell tells listeners about White Feather Press and what kind of authors he is looking for. He also explains how he goes about publishing books and if he publishes anything other than books. Coryell believes self-publishing is much more lucrative than traditional publishing. Coryell publishes a couple of books a year. He shares his latest one. The federal government has issued written guidelines for houses of worship that are confronted with a homicidal gunman. Coryell discusses the rules.

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Find out more about Skip Coryell at www.skipcoryell.com. Visit White Feather Press at www.whitefeatherpress.com.

Narrator: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary for you to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival Show is your family’s insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you’ll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

Jason Hartman: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show. This is your host Jason Hartman, where we talk about protecting the people places and profits you care about in these uncertain times. We have a great interview for you today. And we will be back with that in less than 60 seconds on the Holistic Survival Show. And by the way, be sure to visit our website at HolisticSurvival.com. You can subscribe to our blog, which is totally free, has loads of great information, and there’s just a lot of good content for you on the site, so make sure you take advantage of that at HolisticSurvival.com. We’ll be right back.

Start of Interview with Skip Coryell

Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Skip Coryell to the show. He is owner and president of White Feather Press. He is also a certified NRA advanced pistol instructor, and a chief range safety officer. He is co-owner of Midwest Tactical Training and founder of the second amendment march. You might be thinking, well what are we going to talk about today? Well, we’re going to start off talking about self-publishing and the world of books and publishing and promoting them. Then we are also going to talk about self-defense and second amendment issues as well. So this show is planned to be broadcast on my speaking of wealth show and my holistic survival show, and I think we’ll touch on both topics. So kind of a cross platform show. Skip, welcome. How are you?

Skip Coryell: Hey, I’m doing fantastic. I’m speaking to you here from Southwest Michigan – it’s sunny, it’s warm and I just had a fantastic summer here weather-wise and everything else. So thank you very much for having me on your show. I appreciate it.

Jason Hartman: The pleasure is all mine, and in Michigan that is a rare blessing, so good for you. Well hey, tell us about White Feather Press and why you started it, what type of authors you’re looking for, and let’s get into the book publishing angle a little bit.

Skip Coryell: Yeah, White Feather Press, I originally started it just as a self-publishing venture to publish my own books. I think by then I had written probably 4 books, and I tried for about 25 years to go the traditional publishing route, and I had several agents – I had three agents.

Jason Hartman: When you say agent you mean literary agent, correct?

Skip Coryell: I had a literary agent from New York City. She was very, very good but she was unable to sell my books. Then I had another one who was kind of mediocre, then I had a third agent finally who was indicted.

Jason Hartman: Indicted for what? Oh my gosh.

Skip Coryell: Oh, it was a scam. She would take people’s money and just go away. But throughout that I learned a whole lot about the publishing industry, when you try that long to get published. I finally just said you know what, I’m just going to start my own company. And this was about 7 years ago, and just publish my own books, and that’s what I did. But low and behold, people saw what I was doing, they were reading my books and seeing how they were produced and laid out, and they go can you do my book too? It just started that way in my basement, and it just grew and grew and grew.

And finally I got to the point where I had to quit my full time job in order to do White Feather Press work, and now I’ve got close to 80 titles, around 35 authors all across the country, and it just keeps growing and growing. I think it’s a God thing, because 95 percent of my authors, they are all devout Christians and that’s just the way it started, and it’s my dream, and I’m just living the dream and loving it.

Jason Hartman: Fantastic. So what is your typical publishing deal look like? Are the authors paying you to publish their work? Are you paying them? Or is it simply a profit share on the back end? How do you work it?

Skip Coryell: Well it’s exclusively a traditional publishing house, and I pay a high royalty. 40% on the net is my standard contract that I send out to authors. Most authors I don’t pay in advance, but instead of 10-20% royalty, they did 40% on the net. My authors are very, very happy. I get multiple titles for all my authors. I’ve got one author that’s published 6 books, one with 3, one with 5… what I’m looking for are authors that want to spend a career with one publisher. So I have to really like your work – I have to believe that God wants this work published. And I have to be able to get my money back plus a little bit more.

And of course, that’s the challenge in publishing. Because I learned early on, this is not an exact science. You can look at a book and go wow, this is so well written. It’s such a good message – it deserves to be published. And then it will sell like 10 copies. And then you’ve got some other books that go wow, this guy is not a really good writer but I’ll give it a shot – I’ll publish it. And they’ll sell thousands. You just never know.

Jason Hartman: It’s not just a science – it’s an art for sure. Good. Well, you’ve got nine of your own books as well, right?

Skip Coryell: Yeah I do. I’ve got 6 novels and then 3 non-fiction books. The non-fiction, two of those are about personal defense, second amendment activism, the one is Blood in the Streets: Conceal, Carry and the OK Corral. And the second one is RKBA: Defending the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Because as you know, I’m the founder of the second amendment march and we held a national rally on the Washington Monument grounds here in DC. So I was heavily involved in that. Also, I’m a former mission and state director for Ted Nugent’s United Sportmen, so I kind of cut my second amendment and personal defense teeth with Ted Nugent as a mentor.

Jason Hartman: I want to get Ted on the show. It’s so surprising to see an old rocker like that be an activist, but it’s great.

Skip Coryell: That’s for sure. Well, send me an Email and I’ll see if I can hook you up with Ted some time. I’ve been known to be successful at that, so just let me know.

Jason Hartman: So what are some of the big lessons that you’ve learned from the world of self-publishing? Or now, I guess we can’t even call it self-publishing because you’re actually a publisher.

Skip Coryell: Yeah, it’s kind of a special taste. But what I’ve learned is, oh wow there is just so much to learn. Mostly about marketing. You can be an incredible writer, incredible author, you can write the all American novel but that doesn’t mean anyone wants to read it or is going to read it or that anyone knows who you are. Marketing. A lot of it is about marketing, and a lot of it is about writing something that people want to buy and read. And it’s like you just throw as much spaghetti up against a wall as you can to see what sticks and then you market that. That’s just basically the way that it is.

But despite all of that, despite having to make a living at this, for me I want to publish books that God will be proud of. So it would be much easier if I were a pagan, and I could just say all right, I can turn on the television and see what’s going to sell. But that doesn’t mean that God’s going to be proud of it or that He would bless my efforts. And so there’s a balance. You have to make a living. I’ve got a wife and five kids at home, so I have to pay my bills, but I also have to be a man of integrity and my publishing house has to mirror what I see in God’s word as this is what… like the movie Courageous – I love that movie, and I like books that tell a story about integrity, duty, honor, family, God, patriotism, all of those things. You write a book like that, and send it to me and I’m going to be all over it like a chicken on a June bug, because that’s who I am and that’s who White Feather Press is.

Jason Hartman: How can you evaluate books though? Because when an author comes to you and says hey, will you publish my work, gosh, you’ve got to read their whole book each time? Or some of them you read a chapter, put it down and say no way.

Skip Coryell: Well, there’s a lot of manuscripts that come in, you read the first paragraph, you see five typos, and you don’t understand what they’re saying so you send them a kind Email saying, this needs some work – good luck to you. Other times you can read the first chapter and go, okay this is really good. I want to take a look at more of it. But it doesn’t stop there, because you can’t evaluate just the work. You also have to evaluate the author number one.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, what is, when you speak of the author, that really leads a lot to the question of is the author going to go out and work after, or are they going to except the whole world to beat a path to their door? So what are some of the best promotional techniques that you’ve seen authors use or that you’ve used to do book promotion?

Skip Coryell: Well, hard work. It’s just flat out hard work. I get some primadonnas that will come in and give me a manuscript and I’ve gotten so that I can recognize them right away, and you want to steer clear of people who have inflated opinions of themselves. Because even if they have a huge name and they’re famous and you know that they’ll sell books, I don’t want to work with those people. Because they are a royal pain in the butt and they always want more. So steer clear of the narcissists whether they make you money or not. I work in the corporate world for 25 years, and now I work for myself and I can do it the way I want to and I want to enjoy my work. Those authors, they are just emotionally and spiritually draining. So you want to stay away from those people. I look for humility – I really do. Humility, people who work hard, I look for people who already have some type of a venue. I had a lady…

Jason Hartman: A platform, yeah.

Skip Coryell: Yeah. A platform, a radio show, a talk show, a blog, something where they have an online presence. Because 80% of books these days, they’re sold online, either by Kindle or print book or audio book. And that’s the big push now. There’s been a huge change in publishing just in the last three or four years. It used to be 10% of my books were EBooks – now it’s closer to 70%, and that number is growing. And the next big push is audiobooks. Audiobooks are up and coming and I just now published The God Virus in audiobook and I was really shocked when I logged in ten days after it debuted, and gosh just a ton of copies were sold. That surprised me.

Jason Hartman: Through Audible?

Skip Coryell: Audible.com and Amazon.com.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, I have my books on Audible too, and I’m a big fan of audiobooks and I buy them all the time personally because they’re portable. You can listen to them while you’re walking to dog or driving the car. You can’t read while you’re doing those things unfortunately.

Skip Coryell: That’s for sure, not for very long anyways. You can listen to it while you’re driving, if you do a lot of travel. People don’t have time, but they want to read, they want to learn, they want to be entertained. You can read it while you’re on the exercise bike, treadmill or whatever. It just works for people’s busy lifestyle and I think that’s one of the reasons audiobooks are just taking off and I want to be on the front end of that wave, and just ride it for all that it’s worth.

Jason Hartman: Absolutely. Okay, let’s switch gears here because I don’t want to run out of time on you, but let’s talk about your interest in the second amendment. I always like to say the second amendment is what makes the first one possible. We are in an epic history changing scenario, potentially lately with the Obama administration and the war on guns. It’s amazing – a couple of decades ago, or three decades ago when MAD came about (mothers against drunk drivers), obviously a good cause – a mother whose child was killed inspired the whole thing. And now decades later we have really diminished the drunk driving problem. We’ve made a huge dent in it, but oddly no one is blaming cars.

Skip Coryell: Yeah, that’s for sure. That seems to be reserved just for guns. You can beat someone to death with a ball bat but until you pick up a gun and shoot someone it’s not a heinous crime. So it’s definitely that way. Second amendment activism is becoming, not fashionable, but it’s becoming more popular in that conservatives are finally going you know what? I’m going to stop caring what other people think about me because I realize that as a nation we’re at a crossroads and if we don’t stop being politically correct and if we don’t stop worrying about what other people think of us, then it’s over. It’s just flat out over. We’ve lost a lot of our freedom already. Sure, we’re more free than Russia.

Jason Hartman: Maybe. I’m not always sure about that anymore nowadays.

Skip Coryell: That’s true depending on the topic – you’re absolutely right.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, it depends on the topic. But let me ask you a question. And this is where the gun control freaks seem to really have a point, and it’s a question I wrestle with. When it comes into the type of fire arms, does everybody need an assault rifle? Should we be allowed to have AK-47s and AR-15s? Now granted, what’s funny about the legislation is it’s more just cosmetic. Those guns are single shot per trigger pull anyway. It’s not like they do any more than just a hunting rifle necessarily. But they look like a military weapon, which I think is cool by the way. But they can’t honestly do any more damage than some good old simple hunting rifles out there.

Skip Coryell: Right. They’re the weak link in the second amendment chain. I was just out on the range yesterday afternoon from 2-5. I sponsored a fundraiser for wounded warriors and it was a father/daughter shoot. We just went there – I had ten girls 9-18 years old with their fathers and I taught them how to shoot pistols, how to shoot rifles, how to shoot shot guns, and these girls were like kids in a candy shop. They just loved it and they learned it safely, and we even shot an AR-15. And we all walked away from there, nobody was bleeding, nobody was the worse for it. They had a great time. They bonded with their fathers. Like you said, it’s cosmetic. And your first statement when you argued do you need that? That’s another thing…

Jason Hartman: You do need it if the government becomes tyrannical and we really do get to the point of societal breakdown or tyrannical government. Then, you will need it. Of course no one can out-fire the government’s fire power. The people will never be able to do that unless they take control of the military, but I guess you have a chance, right? What is the rational when it comes to the type of weapon, make the argument if you would. Or maybe you don’t have an argument and you agree with the gun control people on that part – I don’t know. I don’t know where you stand.

Skip Coryell: No, I don’t. I don’t agree with them. The second amendment, it’s special. And when you talk about need, you’ve already lost the argument. Because it’s like, no one comes to you and says you don’t need that snow mobile, or you don’t need that motorcycle. You don’t need a car that goes more than 70 miles an hour. We would look at them and we would go shut up, get out of my face, this is none of your business. But they do the same thing with a God-given, constitutionally protected right. And we don’t do that – we go oh my gosh, I’m on the defensive.

Jason Hartman: Okay, then let me take it to the extreme then and be devil’s advocate. Because listen, I agree with you. I’m a supporter of the second amendment for sure. But where does it end? Should average citizens like you and I have the right to have a bazooka, a rocket propelled grenade? At what point do you decide, okay this is enough for an average citizen. In California, hypocritically beyond belief, years ago Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’s in all of these incredibly violent movies with all these 50 caliber weapons, he outlawed them. It’s just totally ironic. But where do you draw that line, or would you say you don’t draw it?

Skip Coryell: Yeah, well oddly enough Chris Matthews from Hard Ball asked me the identical question.

Jason Hartman: You mean the guy with the tingling up his leg over Obama?

Skip Coryell: Yeah, that tingly white guy. He asked me the same question. It’s really hard to answer that question because it depends on what the situation is. I think you certainly need state of the art assault type rifles if the government is out of control, and I think we can see that the government is getting out of control right now. They’ve been out of control for a while. So right now, in this particular situation I’m thinking I need AR-15, in fact I’m thinking man, I need full automatic right now and maybe I do need a bazooka. Because I don’t know where this road is heading. Does the average person in everyday life need that? Probably not.

Jason Hartman: Some people listening will write you off for saying that as you’re absolutely out of your mind. But I’ve got to tell you people, all you’ve got to do… people don’t know history anymore. It’s amazing. It’s been so revised and sanitized and politicized and become so politically correct. The text books have all been rewritten and nobody knows the truth anymore. This revisionist history movement has been going on for a few decades now. But every government in the world throughout history that has gone the direction we are now going in the United States of America, has become more and more oppressive and with a socialist bent, and then after that the next step is a communist bent. It means you either have big government – when the government is big, the citizen is smaller.
So people will say that’s crazy, not in America, that could never happen here, we have rights. Well, what guarantees your rights?

Certainly the politicians in Washington have disobeyed the constitution in numerous ways over the past 12, 15 years. It’s just unbelievable what’s been going on. And I say with Bush and Obama, Obama more so, he’s kind of a continuation of George W. Bush – and I love how the critics of Bush love Obama but it’s the same policies but just more of it. It’s crazy and makes no sense.

Skip Coryell: Well, when I look at things like the patriot act – even when Bush came through with the patriot act, I didn’t like it. There is potential for real abuse here. And Obama basically is the patriot act on steroids, and then he passed the National Defense Authorization Act which is even worse. Now we’ve got drones flying in America, we’ve got reporters being spied on. We could be monitored right now and it’s like 5 years ago I would listen to someone like me saying that and I’d go, that guy is paranoid – get him on some Prozac or something. But now I look at what’s happened, and the way we’re going and it’s like, that’s not paranoid. Paranoia is believing something that’s not going to happen.

This is happening now. The NSA is listening to us right now. This is just crazy. That’s why I go, we don’t know what we’re going to need in 5 years. But our God-given rights should not be about needs. Do I need to go to church on Sunday or on Wednesday night, can I only go on Sunday? We wouldn’t think of regulating those other ones to the same degree that we regulate the second amendment. This is a God-given right that we [0:23:03.1] or else [0:23:06.9] things left unattended.

If you leave the second amendment unattended it’s going to be scarfed up like tyrants and it’s going to be genocide. That’s what history has taught us all through the 19th century, anyone who gave up the second amendment rights, they were summarily liquidated. And I just don’t want that to happen. I love my kids, my country, my state, my family, all that.

Jason Hartman: It’s amazing what’s going on and most people are just oblivious. They’re busy sitting at Starbucks and they’re distracted by everything. The two things it’s not polite to talk about are politics and religion and people say oh you shouldn’t do this on social media and post it on Facebook. Are you kidding? We are at a seminal time in history. Maybe in a normal time where everything’s just sort of even-keel, sure, but nowadays, things are changing so quickly and we’ve got to have a dialogue about this stuff, and bring it to the forefront and make other people aware of what’s going on. They can disagree fine, but at least get it out there.

Skip Coryell: Yeah, for sure. We have to talk about it. If we’re going to survive we have to talk about it.

Jason Hartman: We do have to talk about it. Well, any advice you want to give anybody on home safety tips or anything like that, and then I just want to ask you to give out your websites.

Skip Coryell: Sure. Home safety, number one you’ve got to get trained. Number two, you’ve got to get some fire arms. I say training first because a lot of people just run out and buy a gun. But that doesn’t teach you how to defend yourself, how to defend your family, how to operate the gun. Get the training first, then you know better what kind of gun you need to have. And then you can go ahead and protect your family. Join the national rifle association or some other like-minded group.

Political correctness, we have to kill it. It’s a rattle snake – we’ve got to shoot it in the head and be done with it. So speak out at work, at school, at home, at play. Teach your kids the truth about the bill of rights, about God, family and country. Because they’re not getting it at school, and that’s another whole show. So all of those things. If you want to learn about Skip Coryell, go to SkipCoryell.com. Go to Facebook.com/skipcoryell, Midwest tactical training, all of those places. All my books, you can get those at Amazon.com. The God Virus just came out on Audiobook. Go pick that up – that is a lot about preparing for societal collapse and other paranoid things that I love and live and breathe. So all of those things: skipcoryell.com.

Jason Hartman: Sounds good, Skip. Well, hey thank you so much for joining us today and telling us about your publishing involvement and your second amendment involvement too. Keep spreading the word about both.

Skip Coryell: Alright. Thank you Jason. God bless you and have a great day.

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Narrator: Thank you for joining us today for the Holistic Survival Show. Protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Be sure to listen to our Creating Wealth Show, which focuses on exploiting the financial and wealth creation opportunities in today’s economy. Learn more at www.JasonHartman.com or search “Jason Hartman” on iTunes. This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, offering very general guidelines and information. Opinions of guests are their own, and none of the content should be considered individual advice. If you require personalized advice, please consult an appropriate professional. Information deemed reliable, but not guaranteed.

Transcribed by Ralph

The Holistic Survival Team
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