Alec Roth grew up in Hollywood — the son of screenwriter Eric Roth, watching his father adapt books into films from a home office — and he’s now doing the same thing from his own side of the table. In this Author Hour conversation with Lex Statzer, Alec talks about what it actually takes to turn a book into a movie, why he believes “great intellectual property, your stories, they win the day, no matter what,” and how a Scribe author’s book landed on his desk and is now becoming a feature film.

That book is Candler Cook’s From Underdog to Bulldog, the true story of a walk-on’s improbable journey through big-time college football. Alec explains what made it “the modern Rudy,” why he was drawn to the passion baked into the material, and how he and Candler navigated the delicate work of adapting one person’s real story into a film — “I wanted to make sure that he felt he was telling the story he wants to tell.”

Along the way, Alec is candid about the parts of the creative life that every author will recognize: the doubt, the rejection, and the “soft yes” that never materializes. His advice is to believe in the material and keep going — “there’s no one you can’t reach out to.”

He’s especially bullish on books as the best raw material for film (“hundreds of pages… you get this world that you get to play off of”), and he closes with an open invitation: if you’re an author with a story, reach out — he’d love to read it and see if it belongs on the silver screen.

Cameron Herold never wanted to be an author. As he tells Travis Stoliker, his wife signed him up for a three-book package with Scribe as a birthday present — "You're doing three books with them over the next five years" — because she'd noticed that his first book was landing bigger speaking events and building his credibility. Seven books later (four with Scribe), Cameron has one of the clearest views in the series of what a book actually does for a business.

It isn't royalties. Cameron published to establish himself as a thought leader, then watched readers hire him to help implement the very ideas he'd given away for free — paying "$50,000 a year to coach them on the same content that's in the $25 book." His speaking fee climbed from about $3,000 an event before his first book to $40,000 for an in-person keynote today. He walks through the COO Alliance's book-as-lead-magnet funnel in hard numbers: hundreds of free copies mailed a week, an average client signing up within 62 days, a client lifetime value around $14,000. He describes putting his books on a banker's desk to get financed, and carrying three of them into his U.S. green-card interview as "a credibility play."

Cameron is just as sharp on quality and voice in the age of AI. He predicts most books will soon be read by an LLM summarizing them for a human — "adapt or die" — but he's adamant that the book itself has to sound like you. He tells the story of reading the first draft of Vivid Vision, calling it up and saying "this sucks, this does not sound like me," and Scribe rewriting the entire book until "it sounds like I'm literally saying it out loud to you right now. They got my voice down. They dialed it." He'd "rather write a hundred-page book that is absolutely me than a 220-page book that's filled with fluff."

Along the way: a full free-speaking playbook for new authors, the Simon Sinek story of the agency that passed because he didn't have a book yet, tributes to two friends he brought to Scribe, and a closing reminder that "the death rate is still a hundred percent. Let's enjoy the journey."

For more information on Cameron Herold and his books, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/cameron-herold

Gino Barbaro joins Travis Stoliker to trace the full arc of a single book — from getting an idea "out of your head and down on paper" to building a seven-figure business on top of it. Once "the pizza guy," Gino and his partner Jake Stenziano left the restaurant and pharmaceutical worlds for multifamily real estate, and after getting "pretty good at what we did," they wrote Creative Cash to teach the seller-financing strategy few investors were using.

What followed is one of the clearest book-as-business playbooks Author Hour has captured. Gino explains how the writing process forced them to build the frameworks — the "three pillars of real estate," the "SPY technique" — that turned a book into an entire course. He walks through the exact funnel: Facebook ads driving to a free book download, a CRM nurture sequence, a podcast to warm the lead, and a setter/closer sales team offering coaching, mentorship, and masterminds. He's candid about what worked and what he'd do differently (get more testimonials; don't try to write the first book entirely by yourself).

Gino is equally compelling on why a book is worth it beyond revenue. He credits T. Harv Eker's Secrets of the Millionaire Mind with changing the trajectory of his life in 2008, and he now thinks of his own books as "legacy pieces" — something his children and grandchildren can open long after he's gone. "Legacy is not something that you leave behind," he says. "Legacy is something that you activate today." The proof it's working: his 15-year-old daughter is now writing a book of her own.

For more information on Gino Barbaro, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/gino-barbaro

For more information on Creative Cash, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/creative-cash

Atul Minocha joins Travis Stoliker to talk about Lies, Damn Lies, and Marketing — the book an engineer wrote to fix marketing's trust problem. Atul explains the idea that became the seed of the whole project: "Fake ROI," the chapter (number 14) that argues that demanding an ironclad return on every marketing dollar can actually force good marketers to "make up some numbers" to get funded. From there he unpacks the framework at the book's core — "big M" marketing (strategy, positioning, messaging, pricing) versus "small M" marketing (the logos, ads, trade shows, and podcasts) — and why doing the big M first is what keeps your small M spend from going to waste.

He and Travis get into vanity metrics versus action metrics, why Apple's Route 101 billboards make sense even though no one can attribute a single iPhone sale to them, and the timely case for human quality in the age of AI: "there is so much AI slop that it doesn't take much to stand out by just staying away from the AI slop… quality always trumps quantity."

Then there's the part every author wants to hear. Atul went into COVID assuming his business would crater — and instead it exploded, the book took off, Forbes and Inc. came calling, and the ~$60,000 he'd budgeted to recover over three to five years came back in six months. "I would have been happy with three to five years," he says, "but… I've stopped doing the math." He's candid, too, about why he chose Scribe, the single piece of positioning advice that stuck with him ("think of one real person, and use that person's real name"), and the encouragement he'd give anyone who's been sitting on a book idea for years: "you just have to sort of get over the hump to get going."

For more information on Atul Minocha, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/atul-minocha

For more information on Lies, Damn Lies, and Marketing, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/lies-damned-lies-and-marketing

Dr. Thom LeBeau joins Eric Jorgenson to talk about The Black Sheep Advantage — a book he'd been "talking about for 20 years" before he finally sat down to write it. A practicing physician seeing 250 patients a week, Thom describes the very ordinary reason the book kept not happening ("I would start and I would stop") and the very human thing that finally made it happen: a team he didn't want to disappoint, and a standing Friday afternoon he set aside to do the work.

Along the way Thom talks about the idea at the book's core — that going against the crowd, being the "black sheep," is an advantage, not a liability — a lesson crystallized in his mid-30s when Domino's founder Tom Monaghan told him to keep doing what he was doing and stop worrying about everyone else. He's candid about the parts that surprised him: that the book has become a "conversation starter" reaching audiences he never intended (his niece wants to use it with neurodivergent patients), that finishing it was "cheaper than therapy" and taught him something about himself, and that publishing has opened a whole "third third" of life — more books, public speaking, a workbook, and an online course.

For anyone sitting on a book they've been meaning to write, Thom's advice is simple and hard-won: "just start," get "the right team," and treat it as a step-by-step climb rather than an insurmountable mountain. Or, as he puts it about working with Scribe: "This is what I need — something to help me hold my hand along the way."

For more information on Dr. Thom LeBeau, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/thom-lebeau

For more information on The Black Sheep Advantage, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/the-black-sheep-advantage

Dr. Stephen Rue joins Travis Stoliker to talk about Must: Becoming the Person You're Meant to Be — a personal-development book born from profound loss and built around a single idea: that each of us has a "must," a non-negotiable purpose, and that most people stay stuck simply because they don't know where to begin.

Stephen opens with the story at the heart of the book — his stepfather's suicide, his mother kneeling on the closet carpet telling an 11-year-old boy, "Stephen, I will never let something like this happen to you again," and the decades of sacrifice that followed. From there the conversation moves through the ideas Must is built on: how the bad things that happen to us don't have to become our identity, why "we choose the level of our suffering from our past," how our blessings sit simultaneously with our moments of suffering, and why fear at the edge of your comfort zone is actually a "clarion call" that you've entered your "must zone."

He's candid, too, about the book itself. Asked point-blank about his return on investment with Scribe, Stephen doesn't hedge: "It's a spectacular investment. It's an investment in myself. And it's an investment in my legacy." He describes Scribe as "a team... a family" that "legitimately care," and closes with the clearest advice in the episode for anyone sitting on a book they're afraid to start: go into a room alone, write imperfectly, sign a contract with yourself, "and then contact someone like Scribe" — and start today, not tomorrow.

(Note: this episode includes frank discussion of suicide, grief, and childhood trauma; see the sensitive-content flags above before excerpting.)

For more information on Dr. Stephen Rue, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/stephen-rue

For more information on Must: Becoming the Person You're Meant to Be, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/must

Dr. Michael Hittman joins Eric Jorgenson to tell the story behind The Brooklyn Paramount Theatre: An Intimate Portrait — and it is unlike most Author Hour conversations. Michael is an anthropologist who spent 46 years teaching at Long Island University, played pickup basketball for half a century in the Paramount's auditorium (the Guinness people once called to confirm it), and hosted 174 jazz radio shows — all, he admits, while barely paying attention to the "shrine" next door. This episode is the story of how he finally saw it.

Michael traces the book from its unlikely origins — his anthropological idea that "wisdom sits in places," borrowed from Native American thought — to the library research that "absolutely blew my mind," when he discovered that nearly every major jazz musician in history had played the Brooklyn Paramount. He explains the theater's four faces (film, vaudeville, jazz, rock and roll), the Adolph Zukor empire that built it, the Sonny Rollins bridge that runs through his own family history, and the discoveries that turned a tribute into an investigation: a possible art heist, a point-shaving scandal, and his contrarian theory that Tommy "Jive" Smalls — not Alan Freed — fathered rock and roll. Along the way he's candid about why he wrote it at all: "Nobody put a gun to my head… I just decided I wanted to do a book on the Brooklyn Paramount since it was so neglected." He dedicates the book to his late friend and collaborator, photographer Stuart Fischelson. As Eric puts it, this is exactly "what Scribe lives to do" — help someone who has gone deep down a passionate rabbit hole get a book into the world that says things other books haven't.

(Note: this episode contains frank historical discussion, mild profanity, and some pointed personal opinions; see the sensitive-content flags above before excerpting.)

For more information on Dr. Michael Hittman, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/michael-hittman

For more information on The Brooklyn Paramount Theatre: An Intimate Portrait, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/the-brooklyn-paramount-theatre

Kristin Birdwell joins Travis Stoliker to talk about Sex, Drugs, and Soul — the memoir she wrote through COVID and published in 2022 — and everything it has set in motion since.

Kristin traces the book from its first spark ("I always knew I was going to write a book"), through the writing-coach-and-accountability decision in 2019, to the emotional work of putting grief, abuse, and self-discovery on the page. She's candid about the fear: how she kept going by believing "all things work out for good," by holding onto "the impact that it could potentially have on others," and by being gentle with herself — "gave myself space, ate a lot of dark chocolate."

She explains why she chose Scribe over querying agents ("I want this thing... out yesterday") and over DIY uploads she could always spot, and why owning her creative rights mattered with a TV show already in her sights.

Then she walks through the unexpected second life of the book: an Amazon bestseller launch, a podcast that grew from "an exercise to use my voice" into 120 episodes, a storytelling-mentor role at South by Southwest, a TV pilot now getting industry advisement, and the messages that mean the most — readers who write to say "I feel like you wrote this for me and my journey with grief."

Her advice to anyone sitting where she sat in 2019: "if you have that inkling or desire, it's kind of like our future self whispering to us in the present moment," and "who are you to not share your gifts or story in the world?"

For more information on Kristin Birdwell, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/kristin-birdwell

For more information on Sex, Drugs, and Soul, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/sex-drugs-soul