Pivotal People
Join us in conversations with inspiring people doing amazing things. Their insights and experiences help motivate all of us to find our purpose that fits with our abilities, gifts and life situation. Get a "behind the scenes" look at successful people making a difference in the world and benefit from their advice for the rest of us. Our guests include authors, artists, leaders, coaches, pastors, business people and speakers.
Pivotal People
David Dingess: Discovering Faith and Storytelling Through Self-Publishing
David Dingess joins us for an enlightening conversation about his journey into self-publishing and the publication of many books. In his latest book, "Six Hours with the Savior," he writes about the significance of Jesus' final hours with His disciples,
David also shares his experiences navigating the world of self-publishing, shedding light on the often daunting task of transforming a collection of writings into a cohesive book. Since the majority of people report they have a meaningful story that they'd like to write and publish, David's insights are very helpful to make those dreams a reality.
Connect with David and order his books from Amazon. You may be lucky and land on one of his "free Kindle book" days--or pay the full price of just 99 cents!
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I'd like to welcome my friend, david Dingus, to the Pivotal People podcast. That's probably a familiar name because he's been on a couple of times because he is a prolific author. David is a longtime friend, david. I think we go back 20 years. We were in the same small group, couples group together, and we have stayed friends all these years. David and his wife, cindy, are very special to us. He is a fabulous cook and, do you know, every year on my birthday he has us over for dinner and he lets me choose what I want to eat and he sends three choices. I asked him before we started. I said David, why can't you come to our house and make dinner every night? I think that's a reasonable request, anyway very special friend.
Speaker 1:I said today we talked before we started. I would love for David he will share with us today how he developed into being a writer, how he took I said. He's a man of faith and he has found a way to share his faith and his knowledge through books. And he doesn't have a book deal with a publisher. He has learned how to self-publish, which is wonderful because it gives you total control over the process, and he's working on his fifth book.
Speaker 1:His first book, I'll say quickly, was called Child of God. He also makes his books available on Amazon as Kindle downloads, so you have Kindle versions. Sometimes they're absolutely free. He chooses to make those available free because he simply cares about people having access to this kind of information. He's not trying to make money, I guess, is my point. His next book was called when Are you God's Questions that Need to be Answered. And then he had a wonderful devotional which I keep on my nightstand where I do my quiet time every day, called Paths of Peace A Devotional Journey Through the Old Testament Really good.
Speaker 1:His most recent published book is called Six Hours with the Savior what Jesus Wants you to Know Today. Called Six Hours with the Savior what Jesus wants you to know today, David, let's talk a little bit about that, because I read the book and I was like, wow, I never even thought about this. The last six hours with Jesus, what was that like for the disciples, and how does that kind of apply to our life? So welcome, David. I did too much talking, but if you didn't write so many books, I wouldn't have to talk so much.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for having me, Stephanie. As always, it's always good to see you, whether I'm cooking you dinner or here on your podcast.
Speaker 1:On Zoom Six Hours with the Savior, what Jesus Wants you to Know Today. So how did you first of all explain what the book is really talking about there, the last six hours that the disciples were with Jesus over the Passover dinner?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I guess I mean from a writing standpoint, I guess I'm just curious about things. So all of my writings have come from things that I want to learn. So I don't go into it thinking oh well, so-and-so might, or like this group might appreciate this. It's first and foremost, it's something I want to learn. I'm curious in.
Speaker 2:So I have a running list of things that I want to get to, that I probably will never finish, just because the list keeps getting longer and longer. And this is one. It was on my list for probably three or four years. I was doing a Bible study in John and it just hit me as I was reading it that John spent over one-fourth of his gospel on these six hours and it just kind of was like, okay, I want to get to that one day.
Speaker 2:And so when I finally kind of committed to working on this and sometimes things don't turn into books, they just end up being Bible studies as I started researching, it's like the other apostles, the gospel writers, didn't spend very much time. There was a few sentences about the Last Supper and some things about the Garden of Gethsemane, but it was very short, it was just paragraphs. So John spent, I don't know, but it was very short, it was just paragraphs. So John spent, I don't know, it was like four or five chapters. It's like, okay, there's something here and I've missed it Somehow. All my years of Bible study I've missed it. So I want to dig in and try to find out what's going on.
Speaker 2:And of course, it's just amazing when you really start to commit to scriptures, the things that you find and the things that you learn as I started going into it. I really just wanted to try to put myself in the upper room with Jesus. And what were the disciples thinking? What were their emotions? What were they going through? How were they surprised at all of these things that Jesus was teaching them? And then the thing that also hit me is that Jesus knew this was his last six hours before he went to the cross. He had something he wanted to tell these guys and it was really important that they needed to know this before he went to the cross. So if he wanted them to know it, we should probably pay attention to. So that's kind of how it all came about.
Speaker 1:That makes sense Because as I was reading it, I was thinking it's so easy for us because we all know the end of the story. These guys didn't know the end of the story at all. In fact, they were so surprised by the end of the story and after Christ was crucified, there wasn't a single believer. You know, this is not what we thought was going to happen. What were we? Was this a fraud the whole time, and obviously that changed three days later. But in those six hours Jesus knew exactly. You know, david, I haven't thought of that. Of course, that would be the most important thing for all of us to understand, because it was the most important thing for Jesus to communicate to his disciples before he left, because he knew these were the people who were going to spread his message after he was gone.
Speaker 2:Right, he kind of condensed his three and a half year ministry into six hours. So there's so much of our Christian doctrine that came out of this time with the disciples.
Speaker 1:This is kind of like you know the last week your kids at home before it goes to college. And another thing I want to make sure did I ever teach you how to do laundry? That's important. So, yes, I love how you said.
Speaker 1:Bob Goff always says that we write the book we need to read, because in the writing it's okay if no one ever reads the book. You grow so much and you learn so much when you write. So the reason I asked David to be on the podcast again is because I've read a statistic that says 85% of people say that there is a book they'd like to write. I think for many people it's a personal book, it's a memoir, it's some kind of legacy they want to be able to leave behind for their descendants. But it's 85% of people don't write their book for whatever reason.
Speaker 1:We think that there's a pretty high bar to be an author. Some external publisher has to give you permission to be an author. Some editor has to decide that your words are worth publishing. And I'm saying that facetiously because no one has to do that anymore. You have the freedom to write if you want to because of all these cool tools we have available to us now David has published his books with Amazon's free tools and anyone who wants to do that can do that. And David has sold or given away thousands of books, thousands of books. I don't know if he would tell us the number, but I asked him a year ago and it was a higher number than I have sold of my book that went through a publisher. So you can be a real author without anyone's permission. The challenge is and this is what David's going to get to is where do you start? Where do you start, david, and could you kind of share the process, your writing process and then your publishing process, to give people the confidence to get their own book out there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's a long process. I've written things down for years, right, I've been a Bible study in our church off and on for 25 years, so with that comes a lot of writing. So basically it was COVID that gave me the time, because we got to work from home and things were locked down. It's like, well, I've got this Bible study. Now that I've been working on for a while and COVID will be over in six weeks, we'll teach it in class at some point, that's right.
Speaker 2:So I just kept writing, and kept writing, and kept writing and eventually COVID wasn't over and I've got all this material. What am I going to do with it? So I just kind of started thinking about how can I get it printed. I want to give it.
Speaker 2:And I wanted to get into his hands. So it was like what's the cheapest way I can do this without spending thousands of dollars to get one book published. So after researching, I found Amazon KDP process. It's free, it's fairly reasonably easy to use. It was a learning curve getting things formatted, but you can do it all yourself with enough time and you know a little bit of you know want to. So that's kind of how that book got started.
Speaker 2:And then I was I'd say I was nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, because when I pushed publish I didn't see myself as an author, right, Because I just kind of wrote this stuff down. I'm not an author, Just you know. It's like, wow, Okay, All right, what's going to happen? Nothing, no sales come through, Nothing comes through. So then how do you get your book in front of people? So then it was the next process, which is my least favorite process, is trying to promote your book without being self-promoting. So there's websites that you can use that you can promote your book, and my business model as far as making money is terrible.
Speaker 1:Giving away books, oh that's a good model.
Speaker 2:Well, and it stems from my feeling of the gospel should be free. So how can I take, basically, material that God has given me? It's his material, it's not mine. I'm using his resources to make money. It never sat well with me. So there's this magical thing on Kindle that you can give your book away for five days every quarter for the Kindle book. So it's like, okay, let's start doing that and see what happens. So I think that that first book might've given away I don't know 500, 600 copies. It's like, okay, that's kind of neat. You know I get that where I'm a Bible study teacher in a pretty big church and you know we might have 15 to 25 people show up in Sunday school class and and that's great, you know we're learning and reading the Bible together. But then it's like that's when it really kind of hit me that I can do something that reaches outside the walls of our church, way outside the walls. So that's kind of the initial start of my writing. Can't call it a career, it's still a hobby, I guess.
Speaker 1:And you can still find Child of God. So here's what happened. David's my friend, right, so I follow him on Instagram and during this time I noticed he has a tiny link to his book and I think I didn't know David had a book. I didn't know David wrote books he's a very humble man, if you haven't picked up on that yet and so I ordered his book. I think I did have to pay 99 cents, David, but that's okay because of the free birthday dinners. So I read it and I was like, okay, this is good, this is really good. It was like each chapter it's like the basics of Christianity all right there in one book, easy to understand. I can see why your father. This would be a perfect book for someone who doesn't fully understand what the gospel message is, and it's also perfect for those of us who have heard it for years and you want to hear it and see it through a different view, which is why I read these books over and over again, because every author has different life experience and every author brings something new to it. So I thought, oh, okay, he's coming to my house for dinner. I ordered his book hard copy for the woman who was having the birthday and myself and my husband and didn't tell David. So when he came he had to sign our books. It's like good job marketing that secret book. You didn't even tell your friends about it, david, so it was kind of fun to discover.
Speaker 1:As long as I've known David, I think we had known each other 20 years. At that point I didn't know this aspect of you. So when you read someone's book, I'm an avid reader. Anyone who listens to this podcast knows I read everyone's book. I will order the books they've written in the past. They're good readers. The thing I love about reading it's as if you are having a conversation with the author in such a personal way, a more personal conversation than you'd probably have in person, right? You kind of I felt like I knew David better after reading that book than in the 20 years of small talk at dinner parties, and that is also a gift of writing If you want to share this with your father, if you're a person who says you know, I really want my kids to understand this, but maybe they're not old enough yet to grasp it, but maybe after I'm gone they will be.
Speaker 1:Write the book. Write the book, because when you're gone and they're 30 or 40 years old hopefully 50 years old. They're going to be so glad they have it. I wish my mother had written a book. So that's it. It connects us to people who came before us, even if you never got to meet them, especially if your legacy is about sharing faith.
Speaker 2:How about?
Speaker 1:that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and maybe the flip side of that is that I'm enjoying being a Bible study teacher. I love it. I love studying God's Word. That's the heart of most all the books that I write. But where you're in a Sunday school class or even if you're in the church setting and you're listening to a sermon, you're there for 30 minutes sermon and then you kind of walk away. And for the Sunday school class it's like you're 20 minutes and you do this lesson and you kind of walk away, but you can't fully build out the ideas in a Sunday school class setting because it's not built that way, right? So we try to get as much information, useful information, in Sunday school class as possible. But then when you're writing a book that you that's what I think, probably why I enjoy it so much is I can. I can fully develop the ideas and not have to cut myself short. Not that I'm a wordy person, you know I talk so much.
Speaker 1:He's humble and he's easy on the nerves. Well, and I think too for the reader, is that people can absorb as much as they want as the time. You can read 10 minutes, you can come back and read 45 minutes. That's the beauty of reading. Don't get me started on reading. I mean, I am like reading is my favorite thing to do. I love books, so I think we should all turn off the TV and get off the internet and just read wonderful books, but we don't.
Speaker 2:we don't be better off, I think.
Speaker 1:I think so. I think we'd all be a lot calmer, depending on what books we're reading. So I would love to hear so we've talked about your writing. When we write, we're writing the book that we need to read, right? So you're learning. The other piece, david, that I wanted to mention is that we can all share. If we care about sharing our faith, if we care about the people we love getting closer to God, we can recite Bible verses and that will probably fall pretty flat. Or, as Bob Goff also says, we can just share stories of how God has worked in our life, and then that's relatable and that's also your writing is that you're weaving in biblical stories with practical application of how that has showed up in your life. So we talked about this before we started recording your next book. Your next book sounds like it's probably your most personal book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm saying it's a book may you know still not 100% on that yet, but more than likely it will be. Yeah, the what I've been working on is that my mom has Alzheimer's.
Speaker 2:You know, you guys know that, and it's been a hard road, a long, long process. So at some point in there I just kind of started writing things down, just so I could remember them, and just kind of making sure I had the story right, just first to try to remember what was has happened in all this, because it was a crazy time and things happened so fast and there was so much stuff going on. You have no idea. But then it kind of became.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, this is also a way of like honoring my mother, kind of telling her story and you know the woman that she was, and but then, as I kind of was recounting and retelling the story to myself, as I kind of was recounting and retelling the story to myself, it was pretty evident how often God showed up in all of the things that I was having to go through. So it ends up first it was my mom's story and then it kind of became my story, it's kind of my trial, but then finally it actually is God's story, it how he has worked, uh, through this whole process in ways that I could never have foreseen. So, yeah, that's, that's kind of basics and it's still. It's the.
Speaker 1:The first draft still isn't done, so it's it's a ways away but for anyone listening to this, it's like everyone has their own hard story. But when you're able to be at 35,000 feet, when you're a little further away, as you just said, you can see where God showed up in the story and then ultimately it's God's story and that's the message. And how many of those stories are we just letting go by? They're not ending up on paper, you can tell. I want everyone to write, I want everyone to read. I want everyone to write because it is so soul filling to be able to do that, even if no one ever reads it. The whole idea of writing down the stories that matter draw us closer to God. At least my experience has been this, because as you're writing it, as you said, you start observing how God showed up in the story, even if you never published it, just write it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so just a quick story about just kind of and this just happened because of the I don't know. You know, God shows up in strange ways, right. So my mother had to go on Medicaid. It was a long process and a long stressful process. There was a lot of prayer, a lot of things that went into it. The book will have more details about how horrific some of the things that happened to her through fraud and things like that. But I got the notification that my mom had finally gotten on Medicaid, which was a long process, and at that time it was kind of like oh okay, can finally breathe again, things are finally going to work out.
Speaker 2:Uh well, a friend of mine in our sunday school class was working on a bible study for the book of james and for whatever reasons the scheduling, I was called on to teach the first three lessons, which is about tribes, and as I was going through that it was like this isn't by accident and I didn't really see my experience with my mother and her Alzheimer's as a trial until I read the first chapter of James and it's like OK, everything kind of became clear. It's God working in. You know front and center. There's no other way to say it. He didn't work by accident, he didn't do the timing of that by accident, it all happened in his timing.
Speaker 1:Perseverance ultimately gets us to hope right.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:I might be in the wrong, I might be in the wrong book, but trials, they don't define us, they refine us. That's what I heard a speaker say recently. I like that. They don't define us, they refine us. So even in your experience, whether it was a book or not, just being able to write it is probably healing. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And there's something about, like you said, even if you're not going to publish, because to me there's something about picking up a pen and putting it to paper that focuses your thoughts like nothing else. I can type on a computer and things come, but it's like there's something different about actually pen and paper and ink that is different than trying to type things out. I don't know how to describe it. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:Well, I understand that I write in a journal every day. You know hand writing. There is more of a freedom in writing when you know no one's going to read it. I mean, I could leave my journal on the coffee table, say, mom's personal journal. No one wants to read that. It's not about it's not about the privacy, it's just knowing that.
Speaker 1:Hey, you know what? I had total freedom to write whatever prayer I want, write whatever you know, admitting some, something I said or did, that I'm not proud of something. I've learned some. You can just write it all down because no one is going to read it and then maybe ultimately someone does and it's the best writing you could have, provided it's not sanitized. It's not, you know, it's honest and really that's what we want to read.
Speaker 1:Why, when we read people's books and in their memoirs and they're brutally honest, then we're like well, thank you. Now I can relate to you. If you had a sanitized story that made you sound perfect, it would only make me sound worse. Okay, make me feel worse. I am glad you're honest. So I heard a speaker yesterday talking about the writing process and how, when we write and we're just writing for ourselves we're honest and you love to write and then you go work for some sort of publication. Now you have an editor. Now your thoughts and feelings are obviously being edited. You're no longer the good writer you used to be because it's so filtered, so you're not being as authentic. So, yeah, I have to agree with you, david writing with pen and paper, for some reason, that just is more freedom.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and to touch on your point there, stephanie, that the independent publishing process it eliminates that layer of someone else trying to impose their views of what your book should look like. Now that may not mean that your book is going to be, you know, widely read and you're going to be a bestseller on the New York Times, but I wonder how much of those books are, because I've never gone through that process. Are still your books or some of that right it taken away? So I don't know. I've just decided to go down that road and well, I think it's.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you, I had a book with a publisher, which is a good book, and I'm proud of it, but I had written a manuscript just for my sons. I hadn't. I wasn't aiming for any particular word count, but when a publisher published it, there's a standard word count and my book was twice as long as that, and so they asked me to take out half the chapters and I did. It's not a complete story, you know. Had I written it knowing that it was, I was aiming for a certain word count. Maybe I would have been more efficient with my words. But I'll tell you, there were five people, four people, four people who were absolutely critical to what I thought my story was, and they each had a chapter. And the editor said could you consolidate that down to two people? Because we kind of get the point With two examples. You only need two examples, you don't need four. Do you know how badly I have felt that those two people were not in my book? Yeah, you know what had? I self-published and I love my editor and publisher. They were fabulous. I totally agree with the reason why we needed to cut that out.
Speaker 1:I ended up sending each individual person their chapter just so they would know that they were such an important part of the story. So when you write about people, let me tell you that that is so powerful. I mean, I sent people their chapters and there were multiple people. I reconnected with people One woman I had reconnected with her after 30 years. When you write a memoir and you start seeing the people who mattered and how they made a difference in your life, how they stepped into your life, and you write about it, do you know what a gift that is to those people? I loved writing about it. I didn't intend when I wrote it.
Speaker 2:I never intended that they would read it. I didn't think until later. Well gosh, maybe I should send this to them. Well, maybe that's what's wrong with society nowadays. Nobody writes letters anymore. Oh right, we fire off texts and we fire off emails, and half the time we don't even think about what we're saying. You know, I'm always fascinated by going back and looking at like our founding fathers letters to each other. They were, I'm convinced they were, smarter than us. The words that they use I don't even know what they mean, and just they were nicer to each other. And so there's something about again putting a pen to paper and writing something down. You can't take it back, you can't. You know, now you can remove your text, you can edit your text, and it's like you have to think about what you're going to say to somebody before you say it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so to just bam, bam, bam. Here's a 10-word text and it's gone.
Speaker 1:So I think everyone can tell that you and I are convinced that reading is fabulous and writing is fabulous. So I do hope, if anyone is listening to this and you're like, hey, I never thought of writing my own personal book until I heard David and Stephanie talk about it, will you please send a text? You can send a text on the podcast. It says send a text. Send a text because I want to hear about it. So does David.
Speaker 2:So that's our new campaign, david helping ordinary people get their story, just if you start just a prayer journal, or if you start, if you're reading your Bible, make some notes and just see where it goes.
Speaker 1:Do you know what I do to my poor husband? This is awful. I write in my journal every morning and then for some reason I think well, that was really profound, I could go explain it to my husband. But then I would have to, you know, I'm just going to read it to him. You know, my husband, that poor guy, sits through listening to my journal probably three days a week and he always says that's nice, honey.
Speaker 2:But then that way, you know David, he doesn't have to ask me what are you thinking and feeling?
Speaker 1:It's a good point. And then?
Speaker 2:then I know he's never, ever going to read my journal. Well, I think you should use some reverse psychology. It's like just put on there absolutely never read this journal. And somebody's going to read it because they've got to know what's in there.
Speaker 1:I think you're right. Then all of a sudden it gets interesting, doesn't it? Okay, I've kept you over time, you can tell I just love him. So he actually has a job though, so he probably wants to get back to it. Thank you so much. If we're going to look for your new book, where can people find you?
Speaker 2:Where can they?
Speaker 1:find you, david dingus yeah, specifically on amazon.
Speaker 2:That's the only place my books are at okay, and you also have an instagram ministry yeah, I, I do a little bit. It's not what it used to be. It was, um, uh, we can talk, talk about social media some other day, but it got to to be too much for very little return.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, now that you have a library of books, Amazon is the best place to be. So, Amazon, David Dingus. It'll be in the show notes. I'll have the direct links. Maybe you'll get lucky and you'll get one of his five-day-a-quarter free Kindle days.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, follow me on Amazon. And yeah, there's always something free, at least once a quarter free Kindle days.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, follow me on Amazon.
Speaker 2:And yeah, there's always something free at least once a quarter. That's great, and most of the time they're 99 cents.
Speaker 1:So yeah, not bad, 99 cents, All right, thanks so much, david. I'll see you soon, well thanks again for having me. You're welcome.
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