Welcome back to another episode of Incorporating SuperPowers. I am your host, Justin Recla, and if you are a fantasy fan, you love the fantasy fiction, you love all the stories of the Holy Grail and all of the medieval fantasy world that just exist out there, my guest today is an expert in this field. She’s written multiple bestselling books, bestselling series, and today we’re going to be talking about the Holy Grail of publishing. My guest today is Ayn Cates Sullivan.
I’m going to let her share the story because I’m blown away every time I hear her talk about how she got her doctorate degree and the journey that took her on, but more importantly, the path that she’s on now with her publishing company, Infinite Light Publishing and Media new this year Infinite Wealth. The name has changed. The company has been around for quite some time, but she just added the media piece maybe because of the podcast show. She is also one of our hosts on the Super Power Up Network. She is the host of Wisdom of the Ages where she brings storytelling to life with different authors and different guests on her podcast. It is absolutely amazing. Ayn, thank you so much for being here today.
I’m so excited to play with you.
Yeah, this is going to be a lot of fun. I know that you have such an amazing journey and I want to talk about your start. Well, first and foremost, what was your very first best selling book ever? What was the first bestselling book you ever had?
Oh, my first bestseller is a story. I have it here I think. It’s called A Story of Becoming, and I think we’re going to talk about it on another show. This is it here.
All right. Cool.
It was not my first or second or third. I think it was about my seventh but it takes a while.
It does. It does, but you got there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did. It’s a beautiful book. It was not for an hour on Amazon Bestseller. It was the bestseller on Amazon all of 2016 and it continues to be a bestseller. It’s had, I believe, 250,000 downloads, which is just really great. It’s much better than 10 you know, which is quite often how we start out, but I had to learn a lot to get there. Yeah.
Yeah, well that’s a story of perseverance like we were talking about before the show is it didn’t happen overnight, but then now that story was fantasy, correct?
Yeah. It’s a fantasy fable. It’s actually the story of a tree and all these things happen to this tree. She gets eaten. She gets struck by lightning. All these things happen, but she always comes back stronger and more of a miracle, so.
Well I’m going to break a little bit of protocol hard because I want to take this back just a little bit here because I think we need to frame up, really get the listeners an understanding of fantasy. I mean, this is something that you don’t hear a whole lot about let alone talking to somebody who’s mastered it and has created their own publishing company because of the success that they’ve had. Why fantasy? What drew you to dive into that world to become an author in that world?
Well, I went to Columbia University. I was studying to become a poet, but usually an editor and then I got offered an overseas research award to King’s College London, a full ride for free. What do you do? You say yes.
That’s God tapping on your shoulder going, “Come this way.”
Yeah, this is where you’re going and you know, I said yes without even understanding what I was studying over there. I got on the plane, I was like, “Lady Gregory.” The deal was I was supposed to work on the work of Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, who was WB Yeats’s patron and so I went, “Absolutely”. I didn’t realize I would then be wandering around the west coast of Ireland gathering folklore and finding the most amazing stories, particularly of Celtic women. I was so inspired by it. I thought, “Okay, every day I have to tell these stories,” but it took a while to get there.
That’s something that I think is, what they call barge, right? It’s the lost art of the bard of being able to tell the story and connect into it. That’s one of the things I love about your writings is that you’re able to bring the stories to life in such a way that it really connects back into the essence of how the story was originally meant to be shared. This is really … Folks, you heard it, she didn’t get there overnight and I’m super excited to dive into the backend of this to learn more about Infinite Light Publishing and Media because this is what’s going to be changing the way we look at fantasy books, the way publishing gets done because it’s really a holistic approach. Ayn, before we go on break and talk about holy grail, where can our listeners go find more about you?
They can go to infinitelightpublishing.com and find out all about the books we’re bringing out soon.
Fantastic and you could also take a look at her podcast show Wisdom of the Ages on the Super Power Up Network but if you haven’t downloaded the app yet, go to superpowerexperts.com/thenet download the app and here real soon Ayn’s show is going to be actually streaming live on the app as well. So go download that app, go check out the website and we’ll be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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