Interview with Dr. Andrew Wilner
Dr. Andrew Wilner recently recorded an awesome audiobook. It is the narration of his book, “The Locum Life: A Physician's Guide to Locum Tenens.”
Andrew is an old friend to the podcast. I've interviewed him for three episodes prior to this one. We discussed his book, his experience as a medical writer, and his expertise with locum tenens jobs.
But when I discovered that he had recorded and released the audiobook, I wanted to hear more.
Andrew is a board-certified internist, neurologist, and epilepsy specialist. Since high school, he has been an avid writer. As a medical journalist, he has written hundreds of articles and has published four books.
He is also a “YouTuber” and podcaster under The Art of Medicine. There he interviews his guests on eclectic clinical and nonclinical topics. He hosts a second YouTube channel called Underwater with Dr. Andrew which posts his own underwater videos.
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The Locum Life
Dr. Wilner used locum tenens as a tool for achieving work-life balance. He became so adept at it, that he was inspired to write his book, The Locums Life: A Physician's Guide to Locum Tenens.
In addition to his personal experiences for the book, he interviewed several other locum tenens physicians. The book includes their stories, as well as his advice for:
- finding jobs,
- working with staffing agencies,
- understanding malpractice insurance,
- completing credentialing,
- and optimizing travel and lodging.
Andrew's Awesome Audiobook
While promoting his book, Andrew was often asked whether there was an audiobook version. Since he has experience with audio technology from podcasting, he became interested in recording his book himself.
During our interview, he described the major challenges involved in recording a book. There are strict guidelines that must be met. And it is a meticulous and arduous process. But Andrew says he enjoyed it and is pleased with the end results.
Listeners can download the audiobook for free at andrewwilner.com/videos.
Word of Advice
Just to cut to the end, for any of you who are interested in doing your own audiobook: it is very, very hard. And it is definitely a passion project. – Andrew Wilner, MD
Summary
Andrew discovered the benefits of taking locum tenens jobs early in his career. And he used it to achieve and maintain work-life balance. He was able to combine his knowledge of locums and his love of writing to produce a very useful guide for physicians. And it was fitting that he would narrate his own audiobook, which he found challenging but fun and rewarding.
NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.
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Links for Today's Episode:
- Dr. Andrew Wilner's Website
- The Art of Medicine Podcast
- The Art of Medicine YouTube Channel
- Dr. Andrew Wilner's LinkedIn Profile
- Final Cut Video Software
- Why You Will Love the Locum Life – 140
- How to Leverage the Locum Life with Dr. Andrew Wilner – 076
- How to Weave Medicine into a Dedicated Writer’s Life with Dr. Andrew Wilner – 075
- NewScr!pt
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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 244
You Wrote a Brilliant Book Now Record the Awesome Audiobook
John: Today's guest is a wise and generous gentleman. He is an accomplished writer and an active clinician and associate professor of neurology and the only physician author I know, the only physician I know who has recorded his own audio book. Hello Dr. Andrew Wilner.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Hey John. It's great to be here.
John: It's good. I'll explain to my listeners that this is your third appearance, but it'll be the fourth episode because your first appearance yielded two episodes where we talk about medical writing and about locum tenens. So, I thank you for that.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Well, John, I keep trying to get it right. Maybe a few more and it'll be acceptable. Those were all practice runs.
John: No, the listeners, if they go back to the old episodes and this one, they're going to learn a lot about locums and about writing and medical writing, and now something else, which I just had to hear about this process of creating your own audio book. But before we get into that, we'll just talk about little bit of your background. Just tell us your story and all the different things you've done and what you're doing now.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Okay. How much time do we have John?
John: Really five minutes for that part.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: All right. Good. I'll keep that in mind. I am a board-certified internist, sports certified neurologist. I trained in electrophysiology and I work as a clinical neurologist and epileptologist. That's kind of my day job. But since I was a kid, I just loved to read and write. I remember I must have been 13 or so, and I know it because my dad saved the letter. I wrote him a letter "Dad, I finally figured out what I'm going to do in life. And basically, I'm going to be a writer as a young teenager." And so, that has stayed with me. And as a young person, I wrote poetry and short stories and I have a lot of unpublished work. I have four books that are published and I became a medical journalist. And if you go to medscape.com, there's literally hundreds of news articles and commentary that I've written over the years as well as many of the other sites. I don't know, it's genetic. It's just one of those things that I was born to do so.
I think the background there is that the concept of work-life balance has always been a problem for me, since medical school where medical school's pretty consuming, but I wanted to write every day. And so even way back then before I think the term was coined and to common parlance work life balance. Work life balance was always a struggle for me. So, I've taken that very, very seriously. And that kind of led me into locum tenens, which was my solution to work life balance because I could work for a few months and immerse myself into the clinical realm, which frankly I think is very special. But then I could stop and do all the other things that I like to do without feeling guilty or torn, and do a hundred percent. I'm a diver. I like to be underwater and there's no cell single there. And you can't do that when you're on call. And I can write.
So, that's worked well for me. I kind of was on the cutting edge of work life balance, and that led to my book, "The Locum Life: A Physician's Guide to Locum Tenens." Because I saw so many physicians were kind of chucking their medical career because of all the hassles and looking at nonclinical careers. And I think there are some spectacular nonclinical careers. And of course, I'm talking to the expert now on that. And nothing wrong with that. But for those physicians who want to stay in clinical medicine, I thought they should be aware of locum tenens as an option. And many are not. When people would ask me, "What do you do? I'm a locum tenens physician." You get a blank stare. And somehow it was below the radar.
My book is sort of a how-to book on locum tenens. I think that came out three years ago. I interviewed a lot of other locum tenens physicians, and it's kind of peppered with all my stories about finding jobs and what to do on the job and preparing for a job and staffing agencies and malpractice and credentialing and travel. Really all the aspects of that particular way of practicing. So, that led to the audio book.
John: Right.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: When I was promoting the book itself, every now and then somebody would say, "Well, Dr. Willer, do you have an audio book?" Well, we were talking earlier. I am not an audio book person. I don't know. I've tried to sort of learn medicine and other things from audio books, but it always sounds to me like someone reading a book. Of course, it is someone reading a book, but it doesn't sound like I'm reading the book. It's like, there's a third person between me and the author, the writer. It's kind of a weird thing in my head. And I also don't remember things that well when they're just verbal, just listening to lectures on tape. That never really worked for me that well.
So, audio books were really not part of my kind of repertoire. I thought about it, well, let me look into that "make an audio book." And how do you make an audio book? It turns out that it's a whole world. audible.com and there's some competitors, but a lot of people it turns out listen to audio books.
How do you make an audio book? Well, the easiest way, I reached out for some advice and there's a guy, I think he calls himself the Physician Philosopher and he had just launched a book and I was reading his blog. So, I wrote him an email. I said, "How'd you do your audio book?" He said, "Oh, I just paid a guy $500. And he read my book and it was done." And it's like, "Well, okay. So that's one way."
I'm one of those people that does everything himself, my own podcast, the Art of Medicine with Dr. Andrew Wilner. I do the interviews. I do the editing. I post it, I promote it. I don't have a virtual assistant. It might be because I'm too frugal or I'm a control freak or some combination of the above, but I thought, "Well, maybe I could do an audio book." And so, I looked into it. It turns out just to cut to the end for any of you who are interested in doing your own audio book, it is very, very hard. And it is definitely a passion project.
However many books you sell, it's not going to come anywhere near the amount of effort at your going rate. Even if you're working at McDonald's, you're still going to do better spending the day at McDonald's than you are doing your audiobook. That being said, it was a huge amount of fun because it was a leap sort of into this completely different world that I was sort of beginning to learn with podcasting. Which microphone do you need and which kind of software do you use to record and how do you make your room silent? It's like, what does silent sound like?
It turns out a lot of people do make their own audio books and audible.com is sort of the go-to place. And they have something called the ACX University and there's lots of podcasts and videos on how to make your audio book. And there's a lot of elements to it. Of course, the big one that's hard is the tech part because there's a computer that will examine, you record each chapter as a separate file and there's a computer at ACX that's going to listen to it and decide if it's good enough. And if you just talk, it's not going to be good enough.
John: I get it. Okay. I'm going to tell you to stop there for a minute because I want to reflect on a couple of things here. First of all, that was one of the things I recognized. I'm going to go back to your story. You were seemingly much more intentional than the average person. I'm just going to throw that out there in terms of finding this work life balance. You had things you wanted to do. You didn't want to give them up for 8 or 10 or 11 years, and then another 5 doing this or that. That's something we should learn from. It can be done. You just have to figure out how to do it. Locums is one way to do it if you're a clinician. That's one of the things I really was impressed with the first time we met and we talked. So, that is awesome.
I want to also say that I'm with you. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I'm in the middle of moving and probably half the weight that I'm moving is books because I hate listening to audio books. Because I don't have them. They're not tangible. I don't know, there's just something about it. So, I'm with you on that. Those are the main things I just wanted to comment on.
But I did want to ask you more about the podcast before we get into the how-to that you're going to be explaining as at least how you did the audio book. So, tell me about the Art of Medicine. It's a podcast basically, also a YouTube channel. So, I'll call you a YouTuber and a podcaster. Just spend a couple of minutes talking about that because I think it's a generic enough title. So, what do you do on the Art of Medicine?
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Sure. Well, the Art of Medicine is pretty interesting because it wasn't that intentional actually. What happened was, I've always loved gadgets and using the computer for my creative work, making underwater movies for my other channel "Underwater with Dr. Andrew." I used to use iMovie and I graduated to Final Cut and I got a decent microphone and I love to do all that kind of editing.
After I published the Locum Life, I was trying to figure out how to promote it because it's not going to sell enough copies to hire a PR firm at $1,500 a month to promote the book and make it a New York Times Best Seller. It's kind of a niche book, but on the other hand, the people who are in that niche need to know it's out there.
I had the technical know-how. I said, why don't I just make some videos about the locum life and I'll post them. So, I did chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. Five-minute videos. And by the way, these are all available for free on my website, andrewwilder.com, just go under andrewwilner.com/videos. And I thought it's a free resource, a few minutes on each chapter, to get the essence. And it gives me an opportunity to talk about the book.
Well, after I finish chapter 20, who's like, "Well, what do I do now? I ran out." So, I thought, I know I'll interview somebody in the locum tenens world. I decided to interview my staffing agent at CompHealth, Nichole Paskett. And I interviewed her just like you're interviewing me now. And we chatted on Zoom. I edit it and I put it up and it was incredibly popular. It got a lot of views. "Oh, this is fun. Who else could I interview?" Then I thought, "Well, I'll interview my CPA." I have a great CPA, Ben Nanney, because he specializes in locum tenens physicians who work in several states, who are self-employed, and I get 1099s. There's a whole sort of world of economics that is a little bit different. H&R Block is not going to work for you as a locum tenens physician. So, you need somebody who kind of knows the ins and outs. And then, it sorts of grew.
I have a buddy, Michael Weisberg. He is a practicing gastroenterologist. The guy works really hard, super nice guy, but he wrote a novel. And I thought, yeah, let's get Mike on board. So, I've had him twice now. He's written two novels. I had this guy John Jurica come on, episode seven way back. I think I'm up to 61 now, and John talked about nonclinical careers and burnout. I followed John with Michelle Mudge-Riley, who is going to talk about nonclinical careers. And it just kept growing. Sometimes I have medical talks, like, of course, with COVID. I talk to neurovirologist. I've had a couple rabbis on to talk about spiritual aspects of death and dying. And I interviewed Christopher Loo just the other day who talks about financial independence for physicians.
And I interviewed this fascinating guy, Dave Combs, who wrote Rachel's song. And Rachel's song, and Dave, please, excuse me. It sounds like elevator music. He wrote it 40 years ago and it's like one of these songs you've heard a million times, it became a huge hit. But he got 50,000 letters from bands. He was previously a totally unknown person. He just happened to write this song and he got it mastered and put it out there. And many of them found that it helped them during their illnesses, that it was therapeutic. So, we talk about that on the Art of Medicine.
I've just had an enormous amount of fun with the Art of Medicine. I record it just like this. It goes up on YouTube. And then there's an audio only version, which I now know how to do because of recor ding and learning all the tech behind doing an audio book. And the Art of Medicine comes out every two weeks and it's a lot of fun.
John: Well, thank you for that update. And I think I've heard most of the episodes, but I don't think I listened to the one about Rachel's song.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: It's not out yet. It's coming up.
John: Ah, no wonder I haven't heard it. Okay. Well, we all have to listen to that. That's a lot. And I have the feeling or the impression maybe from a previous conversation that your work, you're a professor or associate professor. I'm not sure which. And you're teaching and taking care of patients, but you do have off time now. How is that balanced? Just out of curiosity.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Right. People ask how do you achieve work life balance? And I think the answer is you don't. You just try your best and get as close as you can. This is another way that locum tenants helped me in a way that I didn't predict. I worked as a locum tenens full time for about 10 years. And I would work for a few months and take a few months off. And those off months were usually spent in Southeast Asia, riding and scuba diving.
Fast forward, I met my wife. We got married and she's from the Philippines. She came to the United States with me, and I started dragging her along with me on my various locum tenens assignments. I was at your favorite place, Scottsdale at the Mayo Clinic. And I was in Minnesota. We were flying here, flying there. And then what happens when you get married? How many children in your family?
John: There's five.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Five. And you were one of a dozen or so?
John: I was one of 10. I'm the oldest of 10. Yeah.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: One of 10.
John: Quite an anchor.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: That's quite an anchor. Yes. Having a child and flying around was kind of incompatible with that. Because if we were going to have a baby, I certainly wanted to be home and see what that's all about. I started looking for a full-time position. And I had learned from my locum work that what I really liked was a predominantly clinical job, but I loved to teach. And it was fun to work with residents. It's a little more stimulating and a little less of a grind and it gets you out of some of the drudgery work residents have to do. And as for attending, you don't have to. But there's different responsibilities, but that worked for me.
I had done a few of those as a locum's physician. Geography wasn't that important to me. I'd learned that once you're in the hospital, it's a hospital. And that's where you are most of the time. I started looking for a job and I would apply.
So, my wife and I went to Portland and I had a great job opportunity with Kaiser. We liked Portland, we liked the job, but it wasn't really exciting. I have an academic bent. And I remember asking, "Would there be some adjunct associate appointment? Could I write a paper every year?" And the guy looked at me, and he goes, "No, that would be a waste of your time. We want you to see patients." I said, "Okay, I could see that." But there's no residence there. It was a little discordant with what I wanted. This went on for two years. So, I would go to interviews. The jobs were pretty good, but there was always something. It's like, "Well, gee, this job, this is great. They're paying a lot. It's not that hard. It's in a beautiful location, but it's not too stimulating." Or some other reason why, but it's a job.
All of them were jobs that I would've taken because they were good enough, but I didn't take, because I had locum tenants to fall back on. Because when you need a job, you're willing to settle but I didn't have to settle. So, I just held out. I was like this works for me. When I come home after a week, my wife appreciates me more. It's not that bad. It's a good thing. We'll work it out. And finally, I stumbled on the job I have now where they wanted someone like me and they wanted a senior person who'd been around and had done everything to help with the teaching program, to help with their indigent patients, which is a population that I enjoy and spent a lot of time on over the years.
And I explained to them that I needed time off because I had all these other things going on. And I told them what schedule I wanted. And they said, "Well, as it turns out, we're kind of shorthanded. We've been doing this week on-week off thing. Would that work for you?" And I said, "Yeah, I think that'll work for me." And then they made me in charge of the schedule so that I was able to sometimes do two weeks on and two weeks off, which I just finished. And it was an experiment. Sometimes you get a little ragged and you got to pace yourself, but then you have two weeks to go to the dentist and work on projects and get things done. So, it's an experiment.
This job, I was able to match really 90% of the things I wanted rather than 62%. And this is my fifth year here. And you mentioned, yes, I am an associate professor, but I'm looking towards the possibility of becoming a professor. I've been publishing papers with the students and residents and trying to sort of elevate my game in teaching. And that's a goal of mine.
Work life balance. For me, there's always something else I'd like to be doing. Not enough hours in the day. I remember my dad saying that to me when I was even in college and I wanted to do all these things. And as you get older, it becomes more pressing also. Bruce Willis, that story really resonated with me, last week in the news that he has aphasia, which is kind of a strange way to present it. It's more of a symptom than sort of an illness, a disease.
I don't know why they presented it that way, but of course, I'm a neurologist, so I was interested. It could be a stroke, it could be a brain tumor, it could be dementia, it could be a million things. But it turns out Bruce and I, our birthdays are quite close. And Bruce is sort of the central casting for a V rail healthy masculine guy. I mean, could you be any tougher than Bruce Willis? I don't think so. And here he is succumbing. His career is over because something has struck him out of the blue. So, at our age, you really don't know how much time you have. And so, the concept of work life balance, and what's a priority becomes even more acute.
John: Well, there's no better movie than watching Bruce Willis get beat up. That's by far one of the top movies in my history of what I've watched. The work life balance. What does balance mean? It could be 5% of this, 10% of that, 20% of that as long as family and rest and health are in there, it is part of that.
The people I've interviewed like yourself who are extremely busy because they have all these interests are almost never burnt out. At least they don't feel burnt out. They're busy as heck, but they're doing so many things that they enjoy and they learn how to balance. And the thing is too, when you're doing a lot of things, you're actually much more efficient. I become very inefficient when I don't have a lot of things to do. I sort of just mop around and don't get anything done. But when I have five projects I have to finish today, they all get done somehow.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Yeah. There are these laws of physics. The task expands to the amount of time available. It's like Newton's fourth law or something.
John: Yeah. That's true. I just have to hand it to you, a good example of how to do it. What you're doing now or the university. Now this is a medical center. This is a university. An academic has a part-time so to speak, associate professor, maybe to be professor sometime. Have you seen other positions at that institution or elsewhere?
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Right. To clarify, I am actually full-time every other week, because I'm on call 24/7 and working on the weekends. And so, it actually is full-time, which is important, but you are absolutely right. I kind of stumbled on this job actually on the way to another interview. Memphis, where I am, is a wonderful city, by the way. But I couldn't have told you where it was six years ago, it was not on my radar.
Academic positions are very rarely week on week off. And when I stumbled on this, it's really a clinical position at an indigent hospital with a big teaching component. Grand rounds and a lot of collegialities. We have a wonderful chairman who is very enlightened because I did speak to a chairman similarly when I was applying and I said "I do these other things. I write, I publish articles for Medscape. I do interviews. And I'd like to keep doing them. They generate really a very small amount of income, but somehow, it's pleasurable and it's nice to do."
And he said, "If you come here, that's going to be tough." He said, "Technically, we allow you to do it, but you have to get permission to do it. By the time you get permission to do it, that opportunity will be gone." He says that's the way it works. So, you'd really have to give all that up, which I didn't want to do. And it's one of the reasons I didn't follow up on that. Whereas my chairman here, he said, "Oh, those things are great. They really reflect well on the university. You're out there, you're in public, you're doing high quality work. It's a nice shadow on UTHSC. And that's one of the reasons it gets along.
I think you have to look hard. But in medicine, there's a lot of different opportunities. Even one practice that's one block from the other practice has a whole different kind of culture. And you might make a different amount of money, different amount of hours, different amount of satisfaction. Whereas from a distance it's like, "Well, you are a group of five, they're a group of five." But personalities, attitudes, all can really kind of make or break the experience. So, look hard. Don't settle. Don't settle.
John: Well, it sounds like where you're working, that's a very progressive way of thinking. Job sharing or being flexible in the hours as long as you're contributing an equivalent amount of effort and whether it's time and output, we have to get more flexible in healthcare. We're not going to have any physicians or nurses or anyone else to do this work. There's only so many that these days are going to go into a typical situation. So, that's very interesting.
We have to spend the last few minutes here talking about a little bit more of the specifics of this audio book. Just get into technical aspects for a few minutes. For someone who maybe has already written a book and never thought about recording it, or maybe has thought about and hasn't pursued it. Explain how that process went for you.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Yeah. Well, I would say it was hard because I didn't have a mentor. So I just dove into it. How can I do this? First, it's like, how do you record? I use Final Cut to edit my underwater videos and it has an audio track. I tried that for a while, but then I realized that ACX, as I mentioned earlier, has requirements. For example, you must have a room tone at the beginning and end and be free of extraneous sounds. It must measure between minus 23 decibels and minus 18 decibels RMS and have minus three decibel peak values. And there's more. And it's like, what are they talking about? So, I had to figure all this stuff out. I said, I'll use the garage band, which I have on my apple computer. I fussed with that for a while.
Then I realized, it didn't work for me. I watched a lot of videos and people do it, but garage bands, I couldn't find where it gives you the numbers. You need numbers. Then I found there was a software called Audacity, which is public domain. It works for Mac, it works for PC, but it turned out it did not work for the Mac software version that I had. It was Catalina, whatever it was, it was incompatible with that particular one. And it almost worked. In other words, it looked like it was working, but it actually didn't work. And I searched it on Google and it turned out, "Yes, this one doesn't work."
Well, by that time, Apple, actually a few months later, came out with a new software update and Audacity worked. I watched a lot of tutorials on Audacity and it's really fun. I liken it to Photoshop. If you like taking pictures and fussing with them on Photoshop, well, this is the same thing, except you have an audio track and you can filter it and compress it and put more bass into it and contour it and average it. There are all kinds of fun things to do, but it was a lot of trial and error to be able to record a chapter.
And then in fact, Audacity has a little program after you record it, you use this ACX plugin, and it'll tell you, before you actually upload it to ACX, it'll say "This pass, this doesn't." And a lot got rejected. And so, I had to keep fussing with it to learn what I need to do so that it'll pass. And there's filters and there's things you can do. And there's a particular order in which you need to do them also. And just like Photoshop, you don't want to degrade your image by doing too much to it. It was really fun.
And then the whole other aspect that I really enjoyed learning about was voice. Because when you're doing an audio book, you're not just reading your book. Because if you listen to somebody, if you ever go to some school presentation and the kids are reading the book. It's boring because they're reading the book. To do a successful audio book, it's actually a little bit of acting. It's a little bit of a presentation. You have to be a little more animated than you would be in real life so that it comes through with some energy to the guy who's driving to work or jogging or whatever they're doing while they're listening to your audio book.
It was fun for me because since I wrote the book, the rhythms of the speech were natural to me. Because I wrote it. I think of doing someone else's audio book and of course, there are many people that do that for a living. There are people who are really experts at doing audio books. They've done 50 or 100 audio books written by famous authors. I'm sure if you go buy a book by John Grisham, there's an audio book that John didn't do. And it's a whole career sort of path. But to do your own is kind of fun. And because you're really reading the book a different way and making a little bit of performance art. And of course, you can do it over and over until you get it right.
Mine runs six hours and 45 minutes of me reading the book. But I could only record about 20 minutes at a session. That six hours and 45 minutes was probably about 20 recording sessions where I would go up to my little quiet office, turn off the air conditioner, turn off the fan, turn off the fish filter, tell my wife not to run the washer or the dryer. Hopefully the neighbor didn't have the gardener that day.
All of a sudden, the idea of quiet is not that easy to actually find a quiet space. And of course, if you really get into this, you can buy what's called a voice booth. It's like an old-fashioned Superman telephone booth made out of foam and you bring all your recording stuff inside and it's quiet. And that's what professional voice people use. I didn't really go off the deep end on that. I actually literally put foam up on the walls. I bought these giant pieces of foam and I still have them because I've moved since then. So, they're not on the wall. They're just scattered all over the room because you don't want the sound bouncing around. You want the sound to just sort of be smooth like a fine wine, like a fine Cabernet voice, just kind of cruise.
I will mention LinkedIn. Is it LinkedIn that has those courses now where you can take how-to courses? I did some of those on how to do an audio book. And of course, ACX has their own series. They even have one how to get your audio book to pass ACX because it's not easy. And if you're a beginner, it's just not going to happen. But I like challenges. And for me, this was really kind of a step into a whole other world that I didn't even know existed. And it was a lot of fun. If I write another book, which I'm hoping to do, I'm still working on that work life balance thing, but I will definitely do the audio book to go with it.
John: Will you do that immediately after finishing the written version or some short time thereafter or would you put it off for a while?
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Yeah. I've read about that and that's a marketing thing. And I think the answer is you launch simultaneously. While you've got the buzz, "Oh, I want the audio book. It's there. I want the Kindle. It's there. I want the hard cover. It's there." And then you just promote as much as you can, all the different modalities.
I think the rule of thumb is that for every hard copy or soft cover real book you sell, for every 10 of those, you'll sell one audio book. I think that's the way the audience tends to sit. And that's been true for mine. It's been about 10 to one. I've been pretty happy with that. It's a whole different audience that probably never would've read the book, that's picked up the audio book.
John: Now you said 20 minutes was your limit. What was the limiting factor that put you up to 20 minutes?
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Energy.
John: Really?
Dr. Andrew Wilner: It requires a lot of focus and a surprising amount of focus to actually read word for word what you wrote. Because in my mind, in fact, I did this a few times. I would just change it to a better word but it's like...
John: Hell no.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: But that's not the word. I wrote it the other way for a reason. And then my voice. I would try and do this first thing in the morning. You know how you have a nice resonant voice when you wake up, but then it kind of poops out during the day? So, it's not an end of day job. It's really a priority thing. So that 20 minutes of focus, if it was good, I would quit. Because if you're tired or you're not focused, of course, you just create a lot of work for yourself. You're doing it over and over and it's not right.
I don't like to do things twice. That's my other sort of golden rule for being efficient. You do it once, move on. I think that the "Eat the frog" concept when it comes to audio books is, do the hard thing first and where you've got focus. For me, I had the best focus, it used to be 02:00 in the morning, but I can't really manage that anymore with the rest of my obligations. First thing in the morning, I can do anything when I wake up. By 10:00 o'clock reality sets in, but first thing in the morning, I can do anything and I can do the audio book and my voice sounds good. And there you are.
John: Very interesting. All right. What I got from this is that you have to deal with the technical aspects and there are some resources out there from ACX and elsewhere to learn about that. The voice has to be stable. And I don't know if anyone wants to listen to my voice for six hours.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: You have a good voice, and simply keep the same distance from the mic. Something as simple as that. It's like, it's got to be so many inches. When you come back the next day, you can't have the cleaning lady move everything around. You got to be a little compulsive about your setup.
John: Now, some podcasters talk about putting the sound barriers or absorbers and things. And I haven't done much of that. I don't know if there's much hanging on my walls. I think I have a very directional mic that I happen to use. But when it comes to an audio book, of course, that becomes very important, you said. Because it's just so obvious if something is not right.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Yeah. Well, it depends on your own setup. Lots of carpet. People hang rugs on the wall. Some people record inside a closet that's full of clothes, which actually tempest the sound. That's sort of the cheap and dirty way to do it. It's to bring your laptop into the closet and close the door. I was looking for a little more refined setup than that, but that's kind of a backup plan and how fancy you want to be.
But I would record on a different floor of the house than wherever the other people are. And literally turn everything off that can be turned off. The air conditioning is often a problem. You know how it'll come on, because it's got its own thermostat. Often, I would push it one way or the other. So, it would have no chance. And sometimes I was hot and sweaty doing the recordings here in Memphis in the summer. Like I couldn't have that. It's just amazing what the mic picks up. You just barely hear the sound and I think your brain just doesn't really acknowledge it. It's just a background noise, but then you listen to it and it's like, "Eh." It's like, "Oh that's not going to pass ACX."
John: Oh, my gosh.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: You got to get rid of that. But the other part of the project I'd say more kind of globally that was interesting is of course I was really excited about doing this. It's something new. And I did the first few chapters, chapter five, and I started to get the handle of it. And then it's like, "Oh man, there are 15 more chapters to do."
And I would say in the middle it became very, very difficult. I have found that now in a lot of my projects that the middle is really just a test of perseverance and endurance. As I got to chapter 17, 18, the end was in sight and I kind of got this burst of energy. "I can get it done." But you're a marathon runner. So, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. When you're at mile 10 and you got, I don't know how many more miles to go, it's like "I'm kind of done here" and it's a long, long way before that finish line. So, I could just go home and have a beer and watch TV and talk about it later. Sort of a life lesson kind of thing is that in the middle, it really struck me. It's like the middle is always hard, and it was for the audio book.
John: It sounds like medical school and residency to me that was that middle park. This has been a lot of fun, Andrew. I really appreciate this. Let's see. You've kind of alluded to what you're going to do next. Did you say you're planning to write another book and probably do the audio version of that as well?
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Yes, I am laying the groundwork for doing a fiction book, which is something I've wanted to do. In fact, I did write a fiction book many years ago. It did not get published. For better or worse, there was no self-publishing in those days. So, it did not get published. But writing is one of those things that you do learn by doing.
So published or not published, in fact, if you listen to authors when they got on a program like this and they talk about their latest novel, many of them, and I just heard one the other day. The interviewer said, "Oh, congratulations on your first novel. This is terrific." And this was the Big Time Talker with Burke Allen, which is a wonderful podcast. And, the author says, "Well, actually this is my fourth novel, but it's the first one that I've published." It's kind of a self-training thing. And many authors will tell you that "Yeah, it's my first novel, but it's really my fourth novel. The other ones are in the draw." You just kind of learn by doing. And so, I hope I'm learning by doing, but the next one I would like to see on Amazon. But don't hold your breath. It's going to be more than a year. In the meantime, you can enjoy the Art of Medicine where I interview other authors and pay attention. I pay a lot of attention. I'm hoping it's just starting here in terms of strategies. You also learn what you don't want to do. You read a book and you say "It would've been so much better if he'd done it this way. That way." But you also say, "Wow, that was super cool. How did he even pull that off?" Yes, but that's the plan. There should be a fiction book on my website, andrewwilder.com to join the other four books sometime soon.
And then the way things go, probably a year later, the audio book will surface and that'll be fun. That'll really be fun. I've never done different characters before. My book is a nonfiction book but there'll be this character and that. I hope I can do that. I hope I can do that. If I can't do that, I'll have to hire that $500 guy to do it.
John: We'll look forward to that for sure. Okay. So, you did mention, of course again, the Art of Medicine podcast, and obviously we want to know your website, which is andrewwilner.com. And if you want to look at the videos, just go andrewwilner.com/videos.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Yes. And I love to get emails. You can contact me through my website. And if people have locum tenens questions, there are too many locum tenens things that I haven't figured out at one point or another. So, I'm very, very happy to share for fun. And then there's a lot of resources there. In fact, I even have a new tab "Resources" putting that up there.
John: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for spending this time with us today. I learned a lot today. I think you listeners have as well. And like I said, at the beginning, you are a wise gentleman. So, I appreciate you being here and sharing that with us, Andrew. You take care and we'll meet again soon hopefully.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: That was very kind, John. Thanks so much.
John: My pleasure. Bye-bye.
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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 244
You Wrote a Brilliant Book Now Record the Awesome Audiobook
John: Today's guest is a wise and generous gentleman. He is an accomplished writer and an active clinician and associate professor of neurology and the only physician author I know, the only physician I know who has recorded his own audio book. Hello Dr. Andrew Wilner.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Hey John. It's great to be here.
John: It's good. I'll explain to my listeners that this is your third appearance, but it'll be the fourth episode because your first appearance yielded two episodes where we talk about medical writing and about locum tenens. So, I thank you for that.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Well, John, I keep trying to get it right. Maybe a few more and it'll be acceptable. Those were all practice runs.
John: No, the listeners, if they go back to the old episodes and this one, they're going to learn a lot about locums and about writing and medical writing, and now something else, which I just had to hear about this process of creating your own audio book. But before we get into that, we'll just talk about little bit of your background. Just tell us your story and all the different things you've done and what you're doing now.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Okay. How much time do we have John?
John: Really five minutes for that part.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: All right. Good. I'll keep that in mind. I am a board-certified internist, sports certified neurologist. I trained in electrophysiology and I work as a clinical neurologist and epileptologist. That's kind of my day job. But since I was a kid, I just loved to read and write. I remember I must have been 13 or so, and I know it because my dad saved the letter. I wrote him a letter "Dad, I finally figured out what I'm going to do in life. And basically, I'm going to be a writer as a young teenager." And so, that has stayed with me. And as a young person, I wrote poetry and short stories and I have a lot of unpublished work. I have four books that are published and I became a medical journalist. And if you go to medscape.com, there's literally hundreds of news articles and commentary that I've written over the years as well as many of the other sites. I don't know, it's genetic. It's just one of those things that I was born to do so.
I think the background there is that the concept of work-life balance has always been a problem for me, since medical school where medical school's pretty consuming, but I wanted to write every day. And so even way back then before I think the term was coined and to common parlance work life balance. Work life balance was always a struggle for me. So, I've taken that very, very seriously. And that kind of led me into locum tenens, which was my solution to work life balance because I could work for a few months and immerse myself into the clinical realm, which frankly I think is very special. But then I could stop and do all the other things that I like to do without feeling guilty or torn, and do a hundred percent. I'm a diver. I like to be underwater and there's no cell single there. And you can't do that when you're on call. And I can write.
So, that's worked well for me. I kind of was on the cutting edge of work life balance, and that led to my book, "The Locum Life: A Physician's Guide to Locum Tenens." Because I saw so many physicians were kind of chucking their medical career because of all the hassles and looking at nonclinical careers. And I think there are some spectacular nonclinical careers. And of course, I'm talking to the expert now on that. And nothing wrong with that. But for those physicians who want to stay in clinical medicine, I thought they should be aware of locum tenens as an option. And many are not. When people would ask me, "What do you do? I'm a locum tenens physician." You get a blank stare. And somehow it was below the radar.
My book is sort of a how-to book on locum tenens. I think that came out three years ago. I interviewed a lot of other locum tenens physicians, and it's kind of peppered with all my stories about finding jobs and what to do on the job and preparing for a job and staffing agencies and malpractice and credentialing and travel. Really all the aspects of that particular way of practicing. So, that led to the audio book.
John: Right.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: When I was promoting the book itself, every now and then somebody would say, "Well, Dr. Willer, do you have an audio book?" Well, we were talking earlier. I am not an audio book person. I don't know. I've tried to sort of learn medicine and other things from audio books, but it always sounds to me like someone reading a book. Of course, it is someone reading a book, but it doesn't sound like I'm reading the book. It's like, there's a third person between me and the author, the writer. It's kind of a weird thing in my head. And I also don't remember things that well when they're just verbal, just listening to lectures on tape. That never really worked for me that well.
So, audio books were really not part of my kind of repertoire. I thought about it, well, let me look into that "make an audio book." And how do you make an audio book? It turns out that it's a whole world. audible.com and there's some competitors, but a lot of people it turns out listen to audio books.
How do you make an audio book? Well, the easiest way, I reached out for some advice and there's a guy, I think he calls himself the Physician Philosopher and he had just launched a book and I was reading his blog. So, I wrote him an email. I said, "How'd you do your audio book?" He said, "Oh, I just paid a guy $500. And he read my book and it was done." And it's like, "Well, okay. So that's one way."
I'm one of those people that does everything himself, my own podcast, the Art of Medicine with Dr. Andrew Wilner. I do the interviews. I do the editing. I post it, I promote it. I don't have a virtual assistant. It might be because I'm too frugal or I'm a control freak or some combination of the above, but I thought, "Well, maybe I could do an audio book." And so, I looked into it. It turns out just to cut to the end for any of you who are interested in doing your own audio book, it is very, very hard. And it is definitely a passion project.
However many books you sell, it's not going to come anywhere near the amount of effort at your going rate. Even if you're working at McDonald's, you're still going to do better spending the day at McDonald's than you are doing your audiobook. That being said, it was a huge amount of fun because it was a leap sort of into this completely different world that I was sort of beginning to learn with podcasting. Which microphone do you need and which kind of software do you use to record and how do you make your room silent? It's like, what does silent sound like?
It turns out a lot of people do make their own audio books and audible.com is sort of the go-to place. And they have something called the ACX University and there's lots of podcasts and videos on how to make your audio book. And there's a lot of elements to it. Of course, the big one that's hard is the tech part because there's a computer that will examine, you record each chapter as a separate file and there's a computer at ACX that's going to listen to it and decide if it's good enough. And if you just talk, it's not going to be good enough.
John: I get it. Okay. I'm going to tell you to stop there for a minute because I want to reflect on a couple of things here. First of all, that was one of the things I recognized. I'm going to go back to your story. You were seemingly much more intentional than the average person. I'm just going to throw that out there in terms of finding this work life balance. You had things you wanted to do. You didn't want to give them up for 8 or 10 or 11 years, and then another 5 doing this or that. That's something we should learn from. It can be done. You just have to figure out how to do it. Locums is one way to do it if you're a clinician. That's one of the things I really was impressed with the first time we met and we talked. So, that is awesome.
I want to also say that I'm with you. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I'm in the middle of moving and probably half the weight that I'm moving is books because I hate listening to audio books. Because I don't have them. They're not tangible. I don't know, there's just something about it. So, I'm with you on that. Those are the main things I just wanted to comment on.
But I did want to ask you more about the podcast before we get into the how-to that you're going to be explaining as at least how you did the audio book. So, tell me about the Art of Medicine. It's a podcast basically, also a YouTube channel. So, I'll call you a YouTuber and a podcaster. Just spend a couple of minutes talking about that because I think it's a generic enough title. So, what do you do on the Art of Medicine?
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Sure. Well, the Art of Medicine is pretty interesting because it wasn't that intentional actually. What happened was, I've always loved gadgets and using the computer for my creative work, making underwater movies for my other channel "Underwater with Dr. Andrew." I used to use iMovie and I graduated to Final Cut and I got a decent microphone and I love to do all that kind of editing.
After I published the Locum Life, I was trying to figure out how to promote it because it's not going to sell enough copies to hire a PR firm at $1,500 a month to promote the book and make it a New York Times Best Seller. It's kind of a niche book, but on the other hand, the people who are in that niche need to know it's out there.
I had the technical know-how. I said, why don't I just make some videos about the locum life and I'll post them. So, I did chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. Five-minute videos. And by the way, these are all available for free on my website, andrewwilder.com, just go under andrewwilner.com/videos. And I thought it's a free resource, a few minutes on each chapter, to get the essence. And it gives me an opportunity to talk about the book.
Well, after I finish chapter 20, who's like, "Well, what do I do now? I ran out." So, I thought, I know I'll interview somebody in the locum tenens world. I decided to interview my staffing agent at CompHealth, Nichole Paskett. And I interviewed her just like you're interviewing me now. And we chatted on Zoom. I edit it and I put it up and it was incredibly popular. It got a lot of views. "Oh, this is fun. Who else could I interview?" Then I thought, "Well, I'll interview my CPA." I have a great CPA, Ben Nanney, because he specializes in locum tenens physicians who work in several states, who are self-employed, and I get 1099s. There's a whole sort of world of economics that is a little bit different. H&R Block is not going to work for you as a locum tenens physician. So, you need somebody who kind of knows the ins and outs. And then, it sorts of grew.
I have a buddy, Michael Weisberg. He is a practicing gastroenterologist. The guy works really hard, super nice guy, but he wrote a novel. And I thought, yeah, let's get Mike on board. So, I've had him twice now. He's written two novels. I had this guy John Jurica come on, episode seven way back. I think I'm up to 61 now, and John talked about nonclinical careers and burnout. I followed John with Michelle Mudge-Riley, who is going to talk about nonclinical careers. And it just kept growing. Sometimes I have medical talks, like, of course, with COVID. I talk to neurovirologist. I've had a couple rabbis on to talk about spiritual aspects of death and dying. And I interviewed Christopher Loo just the other day who talks about financial independence for physicians.
And I interviewed this fascinating guy, Dave Combs, who wrote Rachel's song. And Rachel's song, and Dave, please, excuse me. It sounds like elevator music. He wrote it 40 years ago and it's like one of these songs you've heard a million times, it became a huge hit. But he got 50,000 letters from bands. He was previously a totally unknown person. He just happened to write this song and he got it mastered and put it out there. And many of them found that it helped them during their illnesses, that it was therapeutic. So, we talk about that on the Art of Medicine.
I've just had an enormous amount of fun with the Art of Medicine. I record it just like this. It goes up on YouTube. And then there's an audio only version, which I now know how to do because of recor ding and learning all the tech behind doing an audio book. And the Art of Medicine comes out every two weeks and it's a lot of fun.
John: Well, thank you for that update. And I think I've heard most of the episodes, but I don't think I listened to the one about Rachel's song.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: It's not out yet. It's coming up.
John: Ah, no wonder I haven't heard it. Okay. Well, we all have to listen to that. That's a lot. And I have the feeling or the impression maybe from a previous conversation that your work, you're a professor or associate professor. I'm not sure which. And you're teaching and taking care of patients, but you do have off time now. How is that balanced? Just out of curiosity.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Right. People ask how do you achieve work life balance? And I think the answer is you don't. You just try your best and get as close as you can. This is another way that locum tenants helped me in a way that I didn't predict. I worked as a locum tenens full time for about 10 years. And I would work for a few months and take a few months off. And those off months were usually spent in Southeast Asia, riding and scuba diving.
Fast forward, I met my wife. We got married and she's from the Philippines. She came to the United States with me, and I started dragging her along with me on my various locum tenens assignments. I was at your favorite place, Scottsdale at the Mayo Clinic. And I was in Minnesota. We were flying here, flying there. And then what happens when you get married? How many children in your family?
John: There's five.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Five. And you were one of a dozen or so?
John: I was one of 10. I'm the oldest of 10. Yeah.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: One of 10.
John: Quite an anchor.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: That's quite an anchor. Yes. Having a child and flying around was kind of incompatible with that. Because if we were going to have a baby, I certainly wanted to be home and see what that's all about. I started looking for a full-time position. And I had learned from my locum work that what I really liked was a predominantly clinical job, but I loved to teach. And it was fun to work with residents. It's a little more stimulating and a little less of a grind and it gets you out of some of the drudgery work residents have to do. And as for attending, you don't have to. But there's different responsibilities, but that worked for me.
I had done a few of those as a locum's physician. Geography wasn't that important to me. I'd learned that once you're in the hospital, it's a hospital. And that's where you are most of the time. I started looking for a job and I would apply.
So, my wife and I went to Portland and I had a great job opportunity with Kaiser. We liked Portland, we liked the job, but it wasn't really exciting. I have an academic bent. And I remember asking, "Would there be some adjunct associate appointment? Could I write a paper every year?" And the guy looked at me, and he goes, "No, that would be a waste of your time. We want you to see patients." I said, "Okay, I could see that." But there's no residence there. It was a little discordant with what I wanted. This went on for two years. So, I would go to interviews. The jobs were pretty good, but there was always something. It's like, "Well, gee, this job, this is great. They're paying a lot. It's not that hard. It's in a beautiful location, but it's not too stimulating." Or some other reason why, but it's a job.
All of them were jobs that I would've taken because they were good enough, but I didn't take, because I had locum tenants to fall back on. Because when you need a job, you're willing to settle but I didn't have to settle. So, I just held out. I was like this works for me. When I come home after a week, my wife appreciates me more. It's not that bad. It's a good thing. We'll work it out. And finally, I stumbled on the job I have now where they wanted someone like me and they wanted a senior person who'd been around and had done everything to help with the teaching program, to help with their indigent patients, which is a population that I enjoy and spent a lot of time on over the years.
And I explained to them that I needed time off because I had all these other things going on. And I told them what schedule I wanted. And they said, "Well, as it turns out, we're kind of shorthanded. We've been doing this week on-week off thing. Would that work for you?" And I said, "Yeah, I think that'll work for me." And then they made me in charge of the schedule so that I was able to sometimes do two weeks on and two weeks off, which I just finished. And it was an experiment. Sometimes you get a little ragged and you got to pace yourself, but then you have two weeks to go to the dentist and work on projects and get things done. So, it's an experiment.
This job, I was able to match really 90% of the things I wanted rather than 62%. And this is my fifth year here. And you mentioned, yes, I am an associate professor, but I'm looking towards the possibility of becoming a professor. I've been publishing papers with the students and residents and trying to sort of elevate my game in teaching. And that's a goal of mine.
Work life balance. For me, there's always something else I'd like to be doing. Not enough hours in the day. I remember my dad saying that to me when I was even in college and I wanted to do all these things. And as you get older, it becomes more pressing also. Bruce Willis, that story really resonated with me, last week in the news that he has aphasia, which is kind of a strange way to present it. It's more of a symptom than sort of an illness, a disease.
I don't know why they presented it that way, but of course, I'm a neurologist, so I was interested. It could be a stroke, it could be a brain tumor, it could be dementia, it could be a million things. But it turns out Bruce and I, our birthdays are quite close. And Bruce is sort of the central casting for a V rail healthy masculine guy. I mean, could you be any tougher than Bruce Willis? I don't think so. And here he is succumbing. His career is over because something has struck him out of the blue. So, at our age, you really don't know how much time you have. And so, the concept of work life balance, and what's a priority becomes even more acute.
John: Well, there's no better movie than watching Bruce Willis get beat up. That's by far one of the top movies in my history of what I've watched. The work life balance. What does balance mean? It could be 5% of this, 10% of that, 20% of that as long as family and rest and health are in there, it is part of that.
The people I've interviewed like yourself who are extremely busy because they have all these interests are almost never burnt out. At least they don't feel burnt out. They're busy as heck, but they're doing so many things that they enjoy and they learn how to balance. And the thing is too, when you're doing a lot of things, you're actually much more efficient. I become very inefficient when I don't have a lot of things to do. I sort of just mop around and don't get anything done. But when I have five projects I have to finish today, they all get done somehow.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Yeah. There are these laws of physics. The task expands to the amount of time available. It's like Newton's fourth law or something.
John: Yeah. That's true. I just have to hand it to you, a good example of how to do it. What you're doing now or the university. Now this is a medical center. This is a university. An academic has a part-time so to speak, associate professor, maybe to be professor sometime. Have you seen other positions at that institution or elsewhere?
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Right. To clarify, I am actually full-time every other week, because I'm on call 24/7 and working on the weekends. And so, it actually is full-time, which is important, but you are absolutely right. I kind of stumbled on this job actually on the way to another interview. Memphis, where I am, is a wonderful city, by the way. But I couldn't have told you where it was six years ago, it was not on my radar.
Academic positions are very rarely week on week off. And when I stumbled on this, it's really a clinical position at an indigent hospital with a big teaching component. Grand rounds and a lot of collegialities. We have a wonderful chairman who is very enlightened because I did speak to a chairman similarly when I was applying and I said "I do these other things. I write, I publish articles for Medscape. I do interviews. And I'd like to keep doing them. They generate really a very small amount of income, but somehow, it's pleasurable and it's nice to do."
And he said, "If you come here, that's going to be tough." He said, "Technically, we allow you to do it, but you have to get permission to do it. By the time you get permission to do it, that opportunity will be gone." He says that's the way it works. So, you'd really have to give all that up, which I didn't want to do. And it's one of the reasons I didn't follow up on that. Whereas my chairman here, he said, "Oh, those things are great. They really reflect well on the university. You're out there, you're in public, you're doing high quality work. It's a nice shadow on UTHSC. And that's one of the reasons it gets along.
I think you have to look hard. But in medicine, there's a lot of different opportunities. Even one practice that's one block from the other practice has a whole different kind of culture. And you might make a different amount of money, different amount of hours, different amount of satisfaction. Whereas from a distance it's like, "Well, you are a group of five, they're a group of five." But personalities, attitudes, all can really kind of make or break the experience. So, look hard. Don't settle. Don't settle.
John: Well, it sounds like where you're working, that's a very progressive way of thinking. Job sharing or being flexible in the hours as long as you're contributing an equivalent amount of effort and whether it's time and output, we have to get more flexible in healthcare. We're not going to have any physicians or nurses or anyone else to do this work. There's only so many that these days are going to go into a typical situation. So, that's very interesting.
We have to spend the last few minutes here talking about a little bit more of the specifics of this audio book. Just get into technical aspects for a few minutes. For someone who maybe has already written a book and never thought about recording it, or maybe has thought about and hasn't pursued it. Explain how that process went for you.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Yeah. Well, I would say it was hard because I didn't have a mentor. So I just dove into it. How can I do this? First, it's like, how do you record? I use Final Cut to edit my underwater videos and it has an audio track. I tried that for a while, but then I realized that ACX, as I mentioned earlier, has requirements. For example, you must have a room tone at the beginning and end and be free of extraneous sounds. It must measure between minus 23 decibels and minus 18 decibels RMS and have minus three decibel peak values. And there's more. And it's like, what are they talking about? So, I had to figure all this stuff out. I said, I'll use the garage band, which I have on my apple computer. I fussed with that for a while.
Then I realized, it didn't work for me. I watched a lot of videos and people do it, but garage bands, I couldn't find where it gives you the numbers. You need numbers. Then I found there was a software called Audacity, which is public domain. It works for Mac, it works for PC, but it turned out it did not work for the Mac software version that I had. It was Catalina, whatever it was, it was incompatible with that particular one. And it almost worked. In other words, it looked like it was working, but it actually didn't work. And I searched it on Google and it turned out, "Yes, this one doesn't work."
Well, by that time, Apple, actually a few months later, came out with a new software update and Audacity worked. I watched a lot of tutorials on Audacity and it's really fun. I liken it to Photoshop. If you like taking pictures and fussing with them on Photoshop, well, this is the same thing, except you have an audio track and you can filter it and compress it and put more bass into it and contour it and average it. There are all kinds of fun things to do, but it was a lot of trial and error to be able to record a chapter.
And then in fact, Audacity has a little program after you record it, you use this ACX plugin, and it'll tell you, before you actually upload it to ACX, it'll say "This pass, this doesn't." And a lot got rejected. And so, I had to keep fussing with it to learn what I need to do so that it'll pass. And there's filters and there's things you can do. And there's a particular order in which you need to do them also. And just like Photoshop, you don't want to degrade your image by doing too much to it. It was really fun.
And then the whole other aspect that I really enjoyed learning about was voice. Because when you're doing an audio book, you're not just reading your book. Because if you listen to somebody, if you ever go to some school presentation and the kids are reading the book. It's boring because they're reading the book. To do a successful audio book, it's actually a little bit of acting. It's a little bit of a presentation. You have to be a little more animated than you would be in real life so that it comes through with some energy to the guy who's driving to work or jogging or whatever they're doing while they're listening to your audio book.
It was fun for me because since I wrote the book, the rhythms of the speech were natural to me. Because I wrote it. I think of doing someone else's audio book and of course, there are many people that do that for a living. There are people who are really experts at doing audio books. They've done 50 or 100 audio books written by famous authors. I'm sure if you go buy a book by John Grisham, there's an audio book that John didn't do. And it's a whole career sort of path. But to do your own is kind of fun. And because you're really reading the book a different way and making a little bit of performance art. And of course, you can do it over and over until you get it right.
Mine runs six hours and 45 minutes of me reading the book. But I could only record about 20 minutes at a session. That six hours and 45 minutes was probably about 20 recording sessions where I would go up to my little quiet office, turn off the air conditioner, turn off the fan, turn off the fish filter, tell my wife not to run the washer or the dryer. Hopefully the neighbor didn't have the gardener that day.
All of a sudden, the idea of quiet is not that easy to actually find a quiet space. And of course, if you really get into this, you can buy what's called a voice booth. It's like an old-fashioned Superman telephone booth made out of foam and you bring all your recording stuff inside and it's quiet. And that's what professional voice people use. I didn't really go off the deep end on that. I actually literally put foam up on the walls. I bought these giant pieces of foam and I still have them because I've moved since then. So, they're not on the wall. They're just scattered all over the room because you don't want the sound bouncing around. You want the sound to just sort of be smooth like a fine wine, like a fine Cabernet voice, just kind of cruise.
I will mention LinkedIn. Is it LinkedIn that has those courses now where you can take how-to courses? I did some of those on how to do an audio book. And of course, ACX has their own series. They even have one how to get your audio book to pass ACX because it's not easy. And if you're a beginner, it's just not going to happen. But I like challenges. And for me, this was really kind of a step into a whole other world that I didn't even know existed. And it was a lot of fun. If I write another book, which I'm hoping to do, I'm still working on that work life balance thing, but I will definitely do the audio book to go with it.
John: Will you do that immediately after finishing the written version or some short time thereafter or would you put it off for a while?
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Yeah. I've read about that and that's a marketing thing. And I think the answer is you launch simultaneously. While you've got the buzz, "Oh, I want the audio book. It's there. I want the Kindle. It's there. I want the hard cover. It's there." And then you just promote as much as you can, all the different modalities.
I think the rule of thumb is that for every hard copy or soft cover real book you sell, for every 10 of those, you'll sell one audio book. I think that's the way the audience tends to sit. And that's been true for mine. It's been about 10 to one. I've been pretty happy with that. It's a whole different audience that probably never would've read the book, that's picked up the audio book.
John: Now you said 20 minutes was your limit. What was the limiting factor that put you up to 20 minutes?
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Energy.
John: Really?
Dr. Andrew Wilner: It requires a lot of focus and a surprising amount of focus to actually read word for word what you wrote. Because in my mind, in fact, I did this a few times. I would just change it to a better word but it's like...
John: Hell no.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: But that's not the word. I wrote it the other way for a reason. And then my voice. I would try and do this first thing in the morning. You know how you have a nice resonant voice when you wake up, but then it kind of poops out during the day? So, it's not an end of day job. It's really a priority thing. So that 20 minutes of focus, if it was good, I would quit. Because if you're tired or you're not focused, of course, you just create a lot of work for yourself. You're doing it over and over and it's not right.
I don't like to do things twice. That's my other sort of golden rule for being efficient. You do it once, move on. I think that the "Eat the frog" concept when it comes to audio books is, do the hard thing first and where you've got focus. For me, I had the best focus, it used to be 02:00 in the morning, but I can't really manage that anymore with the rest of my obligations. First thing in the morning, I can do anything when I wake up. By 10:00 o'clock reality sets in, but first thing in the morning, I can do anything and I can do the audio book and my voice sounds good. And there you are.
John: Very interesting. All right. What I got from this is that you have to deal with the technical aspects and there are some resources out there from ACX and elsewhere to learn about that. The voice has to be stable. And I don't know if anyone wants to listen to my voice for six hours.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: You have a good voice, and simply keep the same distance from the mic. Something as simple as that. It's like, it's got to be so many inches. When you come back the next day, you can't have the cleaning lady move everything around. You got to be a little compulsive about your setup.
John: Now, some podcasters talk about putting the sound barriers or absorbers and things. And I haven't done much of that. I don't know if there's much hanging on my walls. I think I have a very directional mic that I happen to use. But when it comes to an audio book, of course, that becomes very important, you said. Because it's just so obvious if something is not right.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Yeah. Well, it depends on your own setup. Lots of carpet. People hang rugs on the wall. Some people record inside a closet that's full of clothes, which actually tempest the sound. That's sort of the cheap and dirty way to do it. It's to bring your laptop into the closet and close the door. I was looking for a little more refined setup than that, but that's kind of a backup plan and how fancy you want to be.
But I would record on a different floor of the house than wherever the other people are. And literally turn everything off that can be turned off. The air conditioning is often a problem. You know how it'll come on, because it's got its own thermostat. Often, I would push it one way or the other. So, it would have no chance. And sometimes I was hot and sweaty doing the recordings here in Memphis in the summer. Like I couldn't have that. It's just amazing what the mic picks up. You just barely hear the sound and I think your brain just doesn't really acknowledge it. It's just a background noise, but then you listen to it and it's like, "Eh." It's like, "Oh that's not going to pass ACX."
John: Oh, my gosh.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: You got to get rid of that. But the other part of the project I'd say more kind of globally that was interesting is of course I was really excited about doing this. It's something new. And I did the first few chapters, chapter five, and I started to get the handle of it. And then it's like, "Oh man, there are 15 more chapters to do."
And I would say in the middle it became very, very difficult. I have found that now in a lot of my projects that the middle is really just a test of perseverance and endurance. As I got to chapter 17, 18, the end was in sight and I kind of got this burst of energy. "I can get it done." But you're a marathon runner. So, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. When you're at mile 10 and you got, I don't know how many more miles to go, it's like "I'm kind of done here" and it's a long, long way before that finish line. So, I could just go home and have a beer and watch TV and talk about it later. Sort of a life lesson kind of thing is that in the middle, it really struck me. It's like the middle is always hard, and it was for the audio book.
John: It sounds like medical school and residency to me that was that middle park. This has been a lot of fun, Andrew. I really appreciate this. Let's see. You've kind of alluded to what you're going to do next. Did you say you're planning to write another book and probably do the audio version of that as well?
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Yes, I am laying the groundwork for doing a fiction book, which is something I've wanted to do. In fact, I did write a fiction book many years ago. It did not get published. For better or worse, there was no self-publishing in those days. So, it did not get published. But writing is one of those things that you do learn by doing.
So published or not published, in fact, if you listen to authors when they got on a program like this and they talk about their latest novel, many of them, and I just heard one the other day. The interviewer said, "Oh, congratulations on your first novel. This is terrific." And this was the Big Time Talker with Burke Allen, which is a wonderful podcast. And, the author says, "Well, actually this is my fourth novel, but it's the first one that I've published." It's kind of a self-training thing. And many authors will tell you that "Yeah, it's my first novel, but it's really my fourth novel. The other ones are in the draw." You just kind of learn by doing. And so, I hope I'm learning by doing, but the next one I would like to see on Amazon. But don't hold your breath. It's going to be more than a year. In the meantime, you can enjoy the Art of Medicine where I interview other authors and pay attention. I pay a lot of attention. I'm hoping it's just starting here in terms of strategies. You also learn what you don't want to do. You read a book and you say "It would've been so much better if he'd done it this way. That way." But you also say, "Wow, that was super cool. How did he even pull that off?" Yes, but that's the plan. There should be a fiction book on my website, andrewwilder.com to join the other four books sometime soon.
And then the way things go, probably a year later, the audio book will surface and that'll be fun. That'll really be fun. I've never done different characters before. My book is a nonfiction book but there'll be this character and that. I hope I can do that. I hope I can do that. If I can't do that, I'll have to hire that $500 guy to do it.
John: We'll look forward to that for sure. Okay. So, you did mention, of course again, the Art of Medicine podcast, and obviously we want to know your website, which is andrewwilner.com. And if you want to look at the videos, just go andrewwilner.com/videos.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: Yes. And I love to get emails. You can contact me through my website. And if people have locum tenens questions, there are too many locum tenens things that I haven't figured out at one point or another. So, I'm very, very happy to share for fun. And then there's a lot of resources there. In fact, I even have a new tab "Resources" putting that up there.
John: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for spending this time with us today. I learned a lot today. I think you listeners have as well. And like I said, at the beginning, you are a wise gentleman. So, I appreciate you being here and sharing that with us, Andrew. You take care and we'll meet again soon hopefully.
Dr. Andrew Wilner: That was very kind, John. Thanks so much.
John: My pleasure. Bye-bye.
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