Bill Bernhardt Demands Truth & Justice for Superman’s Creators

Acclaimed and prolific author William Bernhardt joins host Mookie Spitz for a wide-ranging conversation that starts with the tragic origin story behind Superman and spirals into something much bigger: the brutal collision between creativity, commerce, ego, exploitation, and survival. Drawing from his new nonfiction book The Superman Wars, Bill unpacks how teenage creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster built the first true superhero during the Depression, only to lose control of Superman to businessmen who turned their creation into a global empire while the creators themselves struggled for recognition, stability, and dignity.

Their conversation goes beyond comic book history into an honest discussion about what it means to be a creator in any era. Mookie and Bill connect Jerry Siegel’s fight to modern writers battling algorithms, AI scraping, scam publishers, vanity presses, content overload, and the impossible economics of attention. They dig into why talented creatives so often get crushed by the business side of art, why perseverance matters more than raw talent, and why most writers fail long before the quality of their work ever has a chance to matter.

Bernhardt also shares hard-earned lessons from publishing more than 67 books across legal thrillers, historical fiction, poetry, children’s books, and writing instruction. He breaks down the reality of finding agents, surviving rejection, building a readership, networking without becoming disingenuous, and treating writing like an actual profession instead of waiting around for inspiration to strike.

They also discuss a strong emotional thread: how creators are fueled by this tension of living chaotic, vulnerable, financially unstable lives behind the scenes. Bill's research even took him into Jerry Siegel’s childhood home — the literal room where Superman was born — and he captures that eerie feeling of standing inside the physical birthplace of modern mythology.

If you’re a writer, artist, indie creator, comic fan, or just somebody trying to build something meaningful in a world designed to commodify everything, join them for part publishing war story, part creative survival guide, and part cautionary tale about what happens when imagination collides with money and power. 

The Guest

William Bernhardt is the author of over sixty books, including the Daniel Pike legal thriller series (#1 best-selling novel The Last Chance Lawyer). His previous works include the bestselling Ben Kincaid series, the historical novels Challengers of the Dust and The Florentine Poet, three books of poetry, and the Red Sneaker books on fiction writing. In addition, Bernhardt founded WriterCon Programs to mentor aspiring writers. WriterCon hosts an annual writers conference, an annual cruise, small-group writing retreats, a magazine, plus free bi-weekly e-newsletters and podcasts. More than three dozen of Bernhardt’s students have subsequently published with major houses. He is also the president/owner of Bernhardt Books, which publishes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

In addition to his novels and poetry, Bernhardt has written plays, a musical (book and score), humor, children stories, biography, and puzzles. He has edited two anthologies (Legal Briefs and Natural Suspect) as fundraisers for The Nature Conservancy and the Children’s Legal Defense Fund. In his spare time, he has enjoyed surfing, digging for dinosaurs, trekking through the Himalayas, paragliding, scuba diving, caving, zip-lining over the canopy of the Costa Rican rainforest, and jumping out of an airplane at 10,000 feet. In 2013, he became a Jeopardy! champion.

His Website & Books

https://williambernhardt.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hello and welcome to Incverse Algorithm, the Writer's Pod. And I've got a hell of a writer with me today, Mr. Bill Bernhard. And he's got a new book I can't wait to dive into with him, The Superman Wars. Welcome aboard, Bill. Thanks for making time.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Thank you for having me. It's good to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

If you're on video YouTube, you see Bill's decked out in Superman Swag.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Well, like I was telling you before, this is this is actually my 67th published book, but none of the others gave me cosplay opportunities. So I'm going to make the most of this one.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Yeah, that's terrific. And I want to dive into your oove, which is deep and comprehensive, and you cover off on everything from detective thrillers to teaching writers how to write. Yes. So that's gonna be some juicy stuff. But for starters, let's talk about the story of Mr. Jerry Siegel. A lot of people know about Stan Lee. And Stan Lee was working for like 10 bucks an hour and created Spider-Man and a host of characters that ended up with billions of dollars of revenue. And Stan Lee had issues being recognized, being compensated, and his story is fairly well known. But to your point, I don't think too many people even know who Jerry Siegel is, let alone all the backstory around Superman. Can you enlighten us and turn us on to your book?

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Well, there'd be no Stan Lee without Jerry Siegel, or for that matter, Jack Kirby or anybody else, because Jerry was the first. He created the world's first superhero and basically invented a new genre. And this is when he was still a kid, uh an 11th grader in Cleveland during the Depression. He had always been a very precocious reader and writer, sending things out. He was getting stuff published when he was still a one-digit age. And that's the only reason we know who Superman is today, because he just kept pushing and pushing. His original idea went through a lot of iterations, uh, but he eventually came up with the version we all know and love, the Kryptonian who came to Earth and does good things for people. He ran across town and got his best friend Joe Schuster, who was an artist to draw it, spent years because Jerry wanted a newspaper comic strip. At that time in the 30s, newspaper strips were hugely popular. Comic books didn't start till 35, and they were considered kind of, you know, scruffy and kind of low rent until Superman comes around. And after years, when Jerry can't get a newspaper, and he's approached every syndicate there is and he can't get a deal, so he finally agrees to let Superman be published by a person he knew, a man named Major Nicholson, former cavalry officer and writer, who he'd done work with in the past, and he trusted him. He was a writer himself. He knew he cared about the problems of authors and artists. That's who he thought he was getting in bed with. But unfortunately, literally in the weeks prior to the release of Superman, the company is assumed. The details are all in my book, but basically it's taken over by Harry Donnenfeld, Mob Connections, Rum Runner during Prohibition, indicted twice for pornography. His main interest was he wanted to take his publishing operation into some business that wouldn't get him thrown into prison. So comic books seem like a safe deal. He had no idea what was coming because within weeks, Superman debuts, April 18, 1938, is an overnight sensation. Harry Donnenfeld is a millionaire before one year has clocked between all the books and their over 200 merchandising licenses and whatnot. And Jerry and Joe made some money, but nothing like that. The problem is they found that when they signed, you know, the release so that they could get paid, there was a clause which said the rights to all the characters in this story go to the company. And that's how they lost control of it. So they got published, but lost control of the character.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

And you are also an attorney by trade. So this makes you uniquely qualified to get into the down and dirty as to what exactly went wrong and its implications.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

Well, that was one of the first things that drew me into it. I knew a little bit about this story, but not nearly all there was to know. And I kept thinking, 70 years of litigation? What takes 70 years? I've had cases that went a long time, but not 70 years. So I start and I couldn't find a good explanation. I think sometimes for people who, you know, haven't been through law school and all that, start reading pleadings.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

Or endure getting sued.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

Yeah, yeah, or that. Yeah, exactly right. Uh it can be kind of baffling. So I thought, well, I can straighten that out. But of course, that would be boring if you don't know the people involved. And so I started taking a broader look, and this ended up being Jerry Siegel's story, because I wanted people to understand not just what happened, but why. And to get that, you need to understand who who Jerry was, you know. Not a not a great businessman, not as savvy as he could have been, uh, but somebody who always stood up and and fought, even you know, when it didn't work out for him very well.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

No points against him. You know, bright lights cast long shadows were all imperfect. Nicola Tesla, the inventor, died destitute in a New York hotel room. Right. After everything that he did. So having creative ability and business acumen, sometimes they converge, but not always.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

Yeah, almost never, I think. And in Jerry's case, he'd lost his father when he was 17. Uh, he didn't have an agent, he didn't have a lawyer. Joe's father ran the uh was an elevator operator at a local hospital, so they had no one to advise them. And you can see there's 10 years of just painful to read correspondence between Jack Liebowitz, the accountant that Harry Donnenfeld put in charge of day-to-day operations, and Jerry, because Jerry's always, you know, come on, uh, we created this guy, give us a little more. And Jack's, no, I'm a businessman and we're running a business. And he's just abusive. You know, he's already got the cards in his deck, but he's mean, he's insulting, he's infantilizing. He keeps calling Jerry and Joe the boys, even when they're like in their mid-twenties, as a way of putting them in their place. He constantly threatens to fire them, even though they supposedly have a 10-year employment agreement. I don't know what the value of that is when the boss keeps threatening to fire you.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

And they're the creative force behind the content. None of that would exist if it wouldn't be for their ideation and wherewithal. That's exactly right. Reminds me a lot of Elvis and his manager, frankly, that kind of dynamic where you have the business guy with the whip and the chain, and then you have the creative dynamo who's pretty much out to lunch with regard to what we would consider real-world contingencies.

SPEAKER_00 7:56

Right. So Jerry finally, I mean, he he was drafted. He served in World War II. Uh, but when he comes back in 1946, he finds all kinds of problems at home and at business. His wife apparently had not been paying their taxes, comes home to find he owes$22,000 and back taxes. Plus, the comic company has totally taken over the Superman operation, including hiring his friend Joe to come in-house. And uh worse, they've published a script. He never sold them, an idea he had for Superboy, a new character, sort of uh Superman when he's younger in a rural setting, playing pranks with his powers and that kind of thing. Uh, they rejected it three times, but then when he was overseas and couldn't do anything about it, they ran the story anyway. And and it was popular and it led to a series. So Jerry is just furious at this point and finally files suit in 1947. In response, the company fires both he and Joe, don't send them any more work. And as if that weren't enough, they remove Siegel and Schuster's credits from the feature. Up to then, every Superman story said created by Siegel and Schuster. After that, apparently Superman was just spontaneously generated because there's no credit. Even when they reprinted stories that had appeared before, they colored over the names. I mean, that's just petty and purposeless. And to my we could argue about the legalities all night long. Yes, Jerry made mistakes. He could have handled things better, but taking their names off their own creation, that is just morally and ethically wrong.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

Power is power, and and as Nietzsche said, human all to human. These weaknesses manifest, especially when there's a lot of money and influence involved. And to give a creative artist even a little bit of credit is for some people to give the whole show to them. Look, we owe it all to you. And I'm just a tool for distribution and publishing. And by firing them and mistreating them, they they took control and they took ownership. And for some people, I mean that that that makes for a great day, but to your point, it's morally reprehensible. And as a creative person myself, it's outrageous. The lesson I take from this, though, is as a creative person, listeners and viewers, Inc. vs Algorithm, uh, we're not talking about AI now, we're talking about shady business practices. So ensure that your contract is buttoned up. Bill, you're a successfully published author, more than 60 books. So I'm sure you've had your adventures. But as a lawyer, I'm sure you double you double check what you're getting yourself into. And I think that's a smart best practice for creative people. Of course.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

And and everyone should. And this is why I think this book is so timely. Uh, even if you don't care about comic books or Superman, it's still a very relevant story because this conflict between art and commerce is still very much with us. And commerce always seems to win. I don't care what people are doing, whether you're writing, you're painting, you're creating original content for YouTube, you've got to protect yourself or you will be robbed. That's just the world we live in. I think you know I host uh an annual writer's conference. It's called WriterCon. And we do some smaller programs as well. But one of the things I always try and emphasize is, yeah, of course, learn to write, learn about the business, but most importantly, make friends. Meet other people in the same situation you are that you can call on when you've got a question, or people who uh, you know, might know something you don't. If you're going into traditional publishing and dealing with the New York guys, get an agent because that's their job to take care of you. And that is just so important and still important today.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

Links below, folks, for WriterCon. And I'd love to follow up with you if you're into it and uh see see uh what the sessions were like and what kind of feedback you got. I think providing a resource for writers is just so central. Writing is a very ostensibly introverted pursuit. You're in your own head, you're creating your own content, and writers tend to aggregate around that mood and that feeling that, hey, all the work that I do is just in creating the content and then let the world take it from here. But that's not a good idea for all the reasons that you mentioned, exemplified by Jerry's story, which is the extreme version of this.

SPEAKER_00 12:59

Yeah, I get email from people every day because they've gotten an email or they found a website, somebody's approached them and they went, is this a scam? Is this for real? And it's hard to tell, particularly with AI. Let me tell you, I waited through, I'd guess, around 10 emails this morning, somebody trying to either get my contact info or my money. And they were all credit. I mean, they've clearly their AI has either listened to an interview or scanned the book because they know all about Superman. Yeah. And and, you know, they're just trying to rip people up. For that matter, there are big name publishers that have lines that are basically just vanity presses. Take your money, give you back nothing. Uh, there's all kinds of scams out there. And here's here's another link to put in your show notes. Give them a link to Writer Beware, because it's a great website and it tracks some of these scams that are targeting writers.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

The irony is that AI is getting so good at digging into our content and really often getting to the heart of what we're about, and yet it's coming from the scammers.

SPEAKER_02 14:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

I'm waiting for legit advertisers and legit platforms to understand us and prioritize the algorithm so we rank better for the audiences who do care about our content. Isn't that the paradox that the trailblazers in using AI for precision targeting are the scam artists? That's that's kind of sad, and presumably that's an early precedent, too, with all the other technology.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

Yeah, I'm sure things will. I mean, AI is new, and nobody really, I'm sure there probably are some useful purposes for it. I don't really know what they are, but the generative AI, the thing that makes up stories or videos or whatever, we already have creatives and they don't need to be competing with an algorithm. Let the I mean, yeah, AI can do grunt work that nobody wants to do, fine, but keep them out of creative stuff.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

I agree, but the Venn diagrams are slipping over each other. And one of the common themes on this podcast and my other podcast, the science fiction fantasy factory, is creatives duking it out with AI. And the other point that's beneath, and in a sense, throughout all of this, to your point, is being ripped off. So the AIs, in order to do their generative AI, are literally taking copyrighted material for free, ingesting it into their large language models, chopping it up into tokens, doing the waiting relationships, and then barfing it back out, and they're making all the money. They're getting billions in investor capital. And what about the real humans who created the real content feeding these machines?

SPEAKER_00 15:54

Right. Who now want to charge me a fee to use their algorithm? And I'm like, shouldn't you be paying me a fee? Because I think you scanned my books.

SPEAKER_01 16:03

You scann my books. It's like you're using my content and now I'm paying you 20 bucks a month for what? Right.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

Right. Now you you probably you know about the anthropic lawsuit, which you know, I'll give them credit. At least they have set some money aside to pay writers and you know, have implicitly acknowledged that they should not have done what they did. But there are a lot of companies out there who haven't even done that.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

I think that got anthropic off the hook. You know the power of a settlement as an attorney. Sure. So they are morally and financially done with it, and yet the practice continues. And uh, as creators, we're getting hit on all sides from this email scammers, content being ripped, and we're also competing with AI in terms of the marketplace. I I just read that I think two-thirds of the books published on Amazon are just bot-generated slop. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

I don't know how you'd know that at this time, but I don't know that uh four million new books were published last year, and about three million of them were self-published, you know, meaning they're probably uh digital ebooks only. And uh and that's higher than it's ever been before.

SPEAKER_01 17:26

So I'm a little sus.

SPEAKER_00 17:28

Yeah, that's a lot of AI slap, I think.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

But let's go back to Jerry. Can you give us a little more detail around what I'm most curious about, again, as a creative, is he had that spark for Superman. Right. And Superman, to your point, was the trailblazer of the superhero, right, action hero, and comics as an outlet for laddering that up and really being transformative ultimately into other modalities. Everything from the graphic novels we see now to the storyboarding of the action movies that started it all. What what what do you think triggered that? And where did Superman come from? And where did we get this truth, justice, and the American way, patriotic integration of this idea? And I'm just thinking back to Nietzsche with the Ubermensch and the Superman and all of that historical precedent. Can you tell us a little bit about that context? Get into Jerry's head and see where that takes us.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

I think there are a lot of precursors, as there always are, for Jerry's creation. I mean, we all stand on the shoulders who came before us, right? And I think you read Superman, you can see a lot of Samson in there, the Moses story, both of which, you know, as a Jewish kid growing up in Cleveland, he would have known well. I mean, uh Superman to escape death is put in a basket and sent a long ways so he can be a hero to these new people. That's pure Moses. For uh when you think about the oldest surviving works of literature we have, it's it's Beowulf, Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid. What do they all have in common? I mean, they're all Superman stories, basically. They're all stories about some ancient Egypt, Osiris. Yes, yes. All ancient strongmen's strong men, we love these kinds of stories. I think they inspire people. And uh, and Superman, of course, coming when he did during the depression, really the worst part of the depression, looming war in Europe, massive rise in crime, and particularly juvenile crime and the mob in the United States. And Jerry labeled Superman in that very first story, the champion of the weak and oppressed, which is exactly what people wanted and needed right then. And Superman originally deals with the problems of the day. It's not supervillains and aliens. He takes on, in that first story, he takes on a spouse beater, takes off a woman who's uh been wrong about to be executed because she's been wrongly accused of murder, take saves Lois from being kidnapped, takes on war profiteers, and that's just in the first 13-page story. So it was full of action and relevance to the world that Jerry lived in. And I think that's how Superman became thought of as this symbol of hope. Or you you just quoted the tagline from the 50s. It actually started on radio and then went to the to the television series, the Truth, Justice, and the American Way business. The American Way obviously being kind of political propaganda for the 50s. But it in a real way, he did, you know, he did represent the American way in the sense of being a good person and helping your neighbors and, you know, trying to make the world a better place. Uh I think that's part of the instinctive appeal to the whole character. Here's a guy who's got so many powers, he could just take over, you know, he could do anything he wants, but he doesn't. Instead, he kind of hangs in the background behind this meek, mild secret identity and helps people when he can without taking anything for it. He just does it because, you know, he was raised by a good farm couple in Kansas and they taught him to be a good boy. So he is. How can you not love that character?

SPEAKER_01 21:47

The archetypal hero really, really resonates. And it if you look at the top 100 grossing films of all time, no exaggeration, I think. 85 90 percent of them are science fiction, fantasy, these over-the-top heroic Superman, superhero style adventures. There's something deep and an innate, Jungian in a sense, about how we're just drawn to this, can't get enough of it. And Jerry, as a kid, tapped right into it. So, despite the difficulty in getting it expressed in the real world, and despite getting screwed every which way by these shady business types, it eventually won. Superman became the iconic trailblazer that we know it to be. And your story about the backstory is fascinating because it adds a human dimension to it, full of vulnerability and abuse.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

Yeah. I I mean, I should point out that uh that 1947 lawsuit that he lost was not the end of the story. There's seven years of litigation. Some people listening to this probably remember a lot of publicity that Siegel and Schuster got in 1975 as a result of a PR campaign Jerry launched, which originally was not generated by the mainstream media. It was generated by fans publishing amateur fanzines, and they picked up the story and ran it. And that created the snowball that eventually bled over to the Washington Post and then other TV shows and news shows and whatnot. So eventually uh DC Comics gives Jerry and Joe a pension,$20,000 a year. Basically, what they were paying their secretaries today, we'd say assistants at that time. According to Forbes, Superman makes Warner Brothers, the parent company, about$450 million a year. And that's what they got. And so if you're thinking, I remember when they got pensions, and and so I already know this story, you so don't. There's 50 more years of battling and squabbling. Even after Jerry passes, the torch is picked up by his wife Joanne, who, by the way, was the original model for Lois Lane. So Jerry, the original model for Clark Kent, marries the original model for Lois Lane. And if that wasn't perfect enough, their daughter grows up to become an award-winning reporter. I mean, I couldn't have written that any better. She carries on Jerry's fight, then their daughter, Laura, carries on the fight. I mean, it goes till 2016. I don't want to give away everything, but I will say that they eventually reach a happier ending. Maybe uh, you know, may it be not what it should be, but it it's it's at least a respectable resolution. So there is there is something to look forward to that's positive at the end of the book.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

Great, great. Well, thanks for the little hints of spoilers. Yeah, again, I'm I'm hearing a little parallel with the Stan Lee Marvel saga, too. You had fans who got involved, you had basically compensation coming late, but a little bit of something for Stan too, and he even got those cameo appearances in all the movies, and uh, you know, so eventually with persistence, there is a sense of truth, justice, and we would hope the American way for creators, but you're a creator. We I'm a creator, we create jealousy. People who don't understand the magic that we bring turn us into Prometheus, which is you're the light bringer, and we and we don't like that. And I'm sensing a lot of that that's going on here too, not just about the money, but sticking it to the creative force because it is such an incredible power that people who don't have it want to take it away, or at least mitigate it or silence it.

SPEAKER_00 26:18

I think that's true sometimes. You know, after Jerry is fired, he spent decades just struggling. I think there's a myth that he just sat around whining or something. Not true. He was writing and writing constantly for anybody. He worked for Marvel in Secret. He did more than 170 stories for Disney, for the Italian Disney comics, writing Donald Duck and, you know, the junior woodchucks and stuff. He worked whenever he could find work, but he never got very far ahead. And in 1951, he writes some letters, which are I mean, they're in the book. You can read it for yourself, but I'll just say they're out there. I think Jerry was really kind of falling apart. Uh today we'd probably say he had a nervous breakdown, and uh Joanne was the one who pulled him through. But the point is, he's sending all these inflammatory letters in 51. He thinks the entire creative community is going to rise up and support him. And they so don't. It's just the opposite. There's a letter that same year from Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, both great comic creators. They write DT and say, we just want you to know we don't appreciate, we don't approve of what Jerry Siegel is doing, not supporting him at all. And then what happens? The Siegel family fights and fights and fights and eventually makes some progress. And who comes along decades later? It's the Jack Kirby estate filing a lawsuit, making the exact same claims on the exact same basis. They even hire the same attorney that the Siegel family has been using. Well, you just gotta dust off the briefs. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. No, I mean, Jerry blazed the trail. And, you know, sometimes it's not best to be the guy who goes first, but he made the world a lot better eventually for the comic creators who came after him.

SPEAKER_01 28:14

I think it's inspirational, especially to creative types. We all get punched in the face each and every day, whether it's a rejection letter or whether it's a hard day of trying to slug through our own stuff.

SPEAKER_02 28:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:27

And to see someone like Jerry with that spark never give up. Frank Zappa has a line which is uh two pieces of advice for creatives, don't stop and keep going. And it sounds like it sounds like Jerry epitomizes that uh that Frank advice in a in an effective way. And we're all a little loopy, too, to be honest. We're all a little eccentric. And the more creative you are, the the weirder you are. And and sometimes in a social setting, uh, we don't fit neatly into tribes. And it sounds to me like some of the backstory here is Jerry was kind of weird, he's quirky, maybe even hard to get along with. That's not blaming the victim. I'm merely saying that we're all in this mode of being eccentric and different from most folks.

SPEAKER_00 29:23

No, I think that's true. I say in an author's note at the end of the book that I mean, I think Jerry Siegel was a genius. He launched a new genre, he gave credibility to a whole industry, but he was not a I mean, none of us are perfect person, but I do think that sometimes genius has a price. You know what I mean? It's uh we've seen that too many times with artists or writers or mathematicians and inventors, what have you, that sometimes uh you know, there's a dark side to genius.

SPEAKER_01 29:57

And difficulty in communication. Uh George Lucas sent a one-page treatment of Star Wars to Universal Studios. And I don't know if you've seen it, but it literally makes no sense. It had it had Wookiees and lightsabers, and there really was no story. It was it was truly incomprehensible. And Universal looked at it and was like, get out of here. Worst business decision ever. But the price to be paid for being a genius, sometimes you're you're you're in your own world, and and you could be very eccentric.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

Yeah, Jerry just couldn't understand why these guys wouldn't, you know, come on, we've made a ton of money for you. Give us a little more. But of course, Jack Liebowitz was a businessman. You know, he had no reason to do that. Uh as far as he was concerned, talent was interchangeable. If Jerry quit, he'd just get somebody else. So what difference does it make?

SPEAKER_01 31:00

And when you're focused on business, then what's cherished and important for the creative is not part of your world at all. And conversely, if you're if you're barreling down the hatch as creating, you don't think about the world of the businessman, which is completely separate. It's the challenge of bringing those two together, which brings us full circle. There are very few rhythm and lead guitarists out there. You're either good at one or the other. And that brings me to you, sir. You you seem to be good at bringing these worlds together. You have a library of content. You've been writing since you were seven years old. According to your bio, according to your publish any of that, but yeah. Yeah, but yeah, yeah. But but that's very impressive. Can you can you share maybe a few of your best practices and learnings? We've got listeners and viewers here who are up and coming writers, or they're writing and working through it. A lot of indie writers. What have you picked up along the way, and how have you avoided the Jerry Siegel paradox of really being a genius but then getting crushed? Seems like you're very talented, and you've got a great legit career as a professional writer.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

That is huge. Thank you. But of course, I had an agent, and I still do. I had an agent who sold this book. How did you guys find each other?

SPEAKER_01 32:30

That that's that's like a big first step, but it's a cat chasing its tail. I need uh I need to have some popularity to get the attention of a good agent, but how can I get a good agent if you need to come to RyderCon or uh somebody else, but uh someplace else, but you know, we always bring a lot of agents in, and they're not random.

SPEAKER_00 32:51

After 35 years in this business, I know who the good agents are, I know who can be trusted. And you know, I don't bring anybody to RiderCon unless I'd be happy to have them uh as my agent. In fact, my current agent is someone I met at writers at this writers conference. So, you know, that's that's what you need to take care of. You already gave the best piece of advice, which is don't quit. But to add on that, I would suggest people who are writing or aspiring to write or would rather do that than what they're doing now is to start treating it like a job, which is what I do. You know, I get up in the morning. Well, I don't immediately write. I feed the cat, I water the flowers, I take off the trash, and then I sit down and start writing every day, whether I feel like it or not. You know, some days you get up and you, you know, the laundry seems really appealing, you know like anything other than writing, but treat it like a job, which means you show up on time and you put your rear in the chair and you go to work. I understand that people have day jobs, and you know, it's best if you can write every day, even if it's just for an hour or two. If you can't do that, then figure out what you can do. Write on the weekends or get up early in the morning, like I used to do when I was practicing law, and find some way you can put something into this book you're writing every day. Because even if you just get a few pages every day, you know, if you do that every single day in four or five months, you'll have a first draft, which you'll probably think is terrible, but that's why it's just the first draft. Then you go back and revise it and revise it, and each draft takes a little less time, and that's how you get to a book. Don't make excuses, prioritize your writing and do it as frequently as you can.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

Check, check, check. Yeah. I think most folks listening and viewing have at least gotten that far. The real hurdle, and this is where it it's a quantum leap, where you see those math charts where it goes from arithmetic to geometric progression, is I got my books. I got a few. I'm actually indie published, I'm on Substack, I participate in BookTalk, I sell my books at Comic-Con. I'm out there, I'm doing it, but it's just so crowded. We're in an attention economy. You just mentioned four million books, yeah. Four million books. How can I cut through the clutter in a way that I can get people's attention and sustain it? Do I need to do paid advertising? Do I need to find that mythical agent that you're referring to? What's that step, which I think a lot of writers are freaked out about, between being able to sit and crank content and somehow plow through this tsunami that's out there, this content glut?

SPEAKER_00 36:12

Well, we do small group retreats sometimes too. And what I always tell people is to, you know, before you pick your project, figure out what you want. Like, what is your goal? When I was a kid, I just wanted to see my name on the spine of a book at the library, you know. That that would have been the thrill. Other people, you know, want to have a hardcover they can give their mother, or they want to brag to their university friends that they've got this big name publisher, or uh whatever, you know, it's if but you've got to figure out what you want. I've seen people who are writing really good, like serious literary novels, and then get discouraged when it doesn't sell well. Well, why did you think it would? You weren't writing something that would sell well, or you know, if you maybe uh consider a genre project if that's what you want. Something that's romance or mystery thriller or science fiction fantasy, something that's easier to categorize and thus easier to sell. Uh, you know, what do you like? Go on TikTok or the book talk part, and you can find all kinds of people promoting books, but it's usually books in a certain genre, which may or may not be yours. And I would never encourage people to write a book in a genre they don't care about. That's never gonna turn out very well. But figure out what you do want, and that answers, what am I gonna write? That answers, do I need an agent? That answers, where am I gonna take it to try and get it published? Or maybe I'll just publish it myself. But you can't answer those questions until you know what your goals are.

SPEAKER_01 37:57

I think that's spot on, and that's excellent because some folks have the notion that they should not be themselves in order to be successful. And that almost goes back to childhood. I'm not good enough. I need to put on a persona or I need to be someone I'm not, and then things will happen for me.

SPEAKER_00 38:17

Yeah, well, the imposter syndrome is everywhere, right? Especially in the arts. And, you know, I like that I've written 60, published 67 books, but I still finish a first draft and think, boy, that was terrible. When did I forget how to write? And then you go back and make it better and better. Everybody has that. Just table it. Try not to think about it and do the best work you can. And remember, it'll get better. It'll get better. I'm not done yet. I'm gonna keep working, it'll get better. You can absolutely do this, but you have it by having you do it by having faith in yourself and not quitting.

SPEAKER_01 38:58

Once again, Frank Zappa, I'm gonna do the voice. Don't, don't stop.

SPEAKER_00 39:04

Keep going. I I love that advice. You'd like to say that here in the arts, it's gonna all be about talent. And and talent is a good thing to have, to be sure, but honestly, not that uncommon, I think. What is uncommon is having the perseverance to stick it out, like Jerry Siegel did, when he's getting rejected for years over and over again, but he just doesn't quit. And that's why we have Superman. I I can totally relate. I got hundreds of rejection letters when I was trying to break in. And, you know, there was a reason. It's because my stuff wasn't very good. But over time, it gets better, and you keep writing and it gets better, and eventually you got the right book and the right place at the right time, and that's when you get published. But it probably won't happen overnight. So you just got to tell yourself, I'm not gonna quit. I'm in this for the long haul. I'm gonna do it until it works, and that's how you get published.

SPEAKER_01 40:08

Awesome. Terrific advice. What was your magic moment? There's usually when in retrospect, a tipping point, you're cranking, you're getting rejected. You know deep in your heart that you're a writer and you're writing. A lot of stuff is coming out, you're refining your craft to your point. And and what happened? How did you first get published? And then how did it eventually ladder up to critical mass sufficient for you to hang your hat on actually having a career as a writer?

SPEAKER_00 40:39

Well, this is going to date me because I I was trying to break in back in the late 80s, and at that point there was no internet and uh no agents nor writers in the small Oklahoma town where I was growing up. So there wasn't really anybody I could talk to. But I got books and read them. I had the writer's market, you know, that has all these agents.

SPEAKER_01 41:02

I remember that, the big book. I used to get that too. It was like a phone book of agents and publishers and all that good stuff.

SPEAKER_00 41:11

And I'm telling you, I approached every single person who was in there who said they represented mystery novels. No interest. I mean, I was I was in the back of the book and the footnotes before I finally found an agent, wonderful agent, Esther Perkins, no longer with us. And she'd basically retired, but she got my package and she liked it. And she said, Well, I know a guy at Ballantyne, which is part of Random House. I'll send it to him. Three months later, I'd sold four books to Random House. But, you know, it took years to get there, which is why I'm saying now, of course, it's a little bit easier to find agents, not really to get agents, but you can look around on the internet and find people. You can send emails instead of snail mail. But I'd be lying if I said it was easy, because it's not. It's still tough to get an agent.

SPEAKER_01 42:05

They are inundated by queries in every possible form. That's right. And and human beings have limited bandwidth. I mean, think about it. How time-intensive is it to really understand an artist? Get into a book. Uh, if you are appraising a painting, well, it's an uninflected image, and you look at it and it reminds you of so and such, or it seems to be a trailblazer in other ways, and you can make an assessment. But books are books. You need to kind of dig in there and create a relationship with the content, which is an enormous investment of time, especially when you're getting thrown dozens, hundreds of options, synopses, treatments. You're swimming in it. And the William Goldman statement is true everywhere, which is nobody knows nothing when it comes to what's going to be a hit.

unknown 42:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:58

And that's how do you know what's going to happen, right?

SPEAKER_00 43:01

They don't know. That's why they publish so many books every month. This is literally true for New York publishers, the so-called big five. 90% of the books they publish lose money. Those books are supported by the ones they don't, but they don't know which one that's going to be. Now, Backlist or people they've been publishing for decades, they can predict that sort of, but new books, they don't know. The for you know, Tuesday with Morris had a first printing of 20,000 copies, which is like nothing in New York. Uh, then the author was on Oprah, and you know, everything changed, but they can't predict.

SPEAKER_01 43:42

With with movies, too. Uh, I think it's even harsher. 90, 95% of movies are big losers, and the hits float the entire industry. But a hit is a hit. That's a quantum leap that that propels. You got you got hundreds, thousands of science. Fiction fantasy writers, you got one Andy Weir. Right. And he got the adaptations and the movies, and it's off to the races. But to your point, Andy Weir toiled for a couple decades. He wrote stuff that he himself calls garbage. It took him 10 years to put together his personal email list. So you gotta do the lifting, and you need to create, is what I'm hearing centrally, human relationships are the backbone to a career one way or another.

SPEAKER_00 44:31

I think that's true. You come and meet people, that's gonna be your street team or your beta readers, readers, or your critique group, or just it's nice to have people you can call or email when you've got a question and you just, oh my gosh, is this legit or not? Should I do this? I don't know. And it's nice to have a brain to pick. Agents today, I think, are doing the work that in now I I'm dating myself again, but having been in this business for decades, I can see that agents are more and more doing work that used to be done with publishing at the publishers. That is uh coming up with a proposal and shaping, you know, selling it in a way that's uh gonna be uh commercially appealing to somebody or uh coming up with good copy. Good agents are doing that now, and publishers are just kind of slurping it up because they don't have time. The people in those companies that call themselves editors rarely do any actual editing. They go to meetings all day when they have time. So uh and when it comes to PR, which you also published on it, uh mentioned earlier, uh, you're gonna be involved if you're a writer. I think there's a myth that if you get a traditional publisher, then you don't have to promote it yourself. That is so wrong. If you're gonna publish a book, you're gonna have to be involved in the promotion. If you're not, your book's gonna tank. So just suck it up and get ready for it. That is part of the job.

SPEAKER_01 46:06

I have a friend of mine who did that very traditional trajectory of a treatment to finding an agent. He had a good social media following, big press, the big release, Kareem Abdul Jabbar writing a review of the book in the New York Times. And I even told him, I go, bro, you gotta hit the road. If you have to quit your day job for six months, a year, you've got to self-promote. And I think he was under the impression, sucking up to the myth that you just described. I did my work, I'm published. We wish. But you need to be out there and and and hustle in. Uh James Elroy is one of my favorite writers, talking about mystery thrillers, LA Confidential, American Tabloid. The guy's like seven feet tall, and he constantly book signings, on the road, interviews, just a machine of self-promotion. I don't think we'd have LA Confidential if this guy wouldn't have been hustling on the road to make it happen.

SPEAKER_00 47:16

Nope, that's how you get the word out. But we do have the internet now. I gotta say, people gripe about social media, and I get that. But speaking as somebody who's been on so-called book tours, I can tell you, if book tour sounds glamorous to you, that tells me you've never been on one. Because it's not, it's just uh new flight every day and zooming in to do the morning show and you know, sitting at tables and book signings, drumming your fingers and giving people directions to the bathroom. That's I'd rather do social media or talking like we're doing right now, thank courtesy of the internet. That's that's much better. I'd rather do that any day.

SPEAKER_01 48:01

Absolutely. Uh, I just got finished at the LA Times Festival of Books. So I had four or five of my books out there. Great crowd, best, best crowd ever for selling anything, any genre. They're hungry, they're readers. If you go to a Comic-Con or one of those more specialized ones, they're much more discerning and they're in costumes and they don't really have time for writers. But suffice to say, it was two days that was terrific, utterly exhausting. It'll it'll wipe you out to do these live events. Need to do them, but get on Instagram, get on TikTok, share your stuff, and do podcasts and come on this show.

SPEAKER_00 48:43

Podcasts are great because you know they're uh you can listen to them from your phone. There's no pressure, you don't have to be in a certain place at a certain time, they're just there when you need them. And uh I I get a lot of good information out of podcasts.

SPEAKER_01 48:58

Oh, and I love hosting writers exactly like yourself. And on that point, let's try to spend the last few minutes of our great conversation highlighting your your bench, your shelf. You've got a lot of series. You do not only fiction and mystery, but you do writing for writers. You have how-to books, which are very informative, where you share a lot of the best practices that you just outlined here. Can you give us uh give us your pitch for uh Bill Bernhardt?

SPEAKER_00 49:32

There's 10 of those books on writing. They're called the Red Sneaker Writers series, and uh they're relatively short. And I did that on, I mean, each book addresses a different topic. And I did that on purpose because I didn't want them to become uh people's excuses for not writing, you know. Oh, I gotta finish this book that William Bernhardt wrote.

SPEAKER_01 49:54

I can't write mine because I'm reading the book on how to write one.

SPEAKER_00 49:58

So each one of these will take you maybe two or three hours to read and maybe do the exercises, and then you can get back to writing. This is supposed to help not to hurt. Anyway, so I did 10 of those really just because I was doing some teaching at that time at conferences and whatnot, and I thought, you know, that's all well and good. But if you come in with a textbook, then you're obviously an expert. So I wrote the first one for that purpose, Story Structure, it's called. And and then it not only started to sell, but the audio book, which I narrated myself, outsold the print copy. And I thought, well, this is a good deal. Congrats! It's a great way to get a toehold in that. Very good, right? Exactly. And I've done other things, as you probably know. I've done a lot of illegal thrillers and other things in the crime arena. I've done three books of poetry, I've done some books for young adults and children, done a couple of historical novels, although this is my first actual, you know, nonfiction in the Superman wars. I did not make up anything, not to fill out scenes, didn't invite invent dialogue. I write from Jerry's viewpoint, so I use the narrative approach, if you will, but but everything in the book, I've got a source, you know. If there's something in quotation marks, I've either got a wit eyewitness or a document that I'm pulling from. I mean, the story is so crazy anyway. There's no reason to make it up anything.

SPEAKER_01 51:33

It's just kind of the Truman Capote thing with taking a real life situation, but it's very engaging because you're a great writer and it's a narrative. So you're reading about Jerry's story through Jerry's perspective, and uh it's entertaining that way.

SPEAKER_00 51:49

Yeah, that's what I wanted. I wanted this to be engaging, certainly if you love Superman, but even if you don't, because here's a writer, an artist, trying to find his place in the universe and coming up against the forces of commerce that are not too friendly to him. At first, this was a long time ago, to be fair, but uh some of these problems are still with us today and in some ways are even worse and more dangerous.

SPEAKER_01 52:18

With the technology, with the volume of competition, and human nature is likely never really gonna change. That's the number one science fiction trope. Whether you're on Earth or some distant galaxy, humans are still glorious and awful at the same time, and right most things probably will never change. It's just the human, the human condition and nature. Can you tell us a second how how you get a new idea for a book? Because your ove is so diverse. Cover a lot of ground.

SPEAKER_00 52:55

Boy, that's a good question. I don't know. I have a writer friend who used to, you know, when you're inevitably said, Where do you get your ideas? And he'd say, Cleveland. I don't know where ideas come from. I don't really even know where this idea came from, except that uh my previous novel called Justice for All dealt with this art versus commerce conflict. And I remembered Siegel and Schuster and started looking into it, and one thing led to another. And I thought, you know, this could be a good nonfiction book that I don't think has really been fully told before. And so that led, uh boy, I if I had had any idea how long it would take, I might not have gone there. But once you're getting into the story and you think I've got to get it right, and I ended up traveling to eight different states and talked to more than 50 people interviewing them, uh, viewed library collections. I couldn't tell you how many books and periodicals I read. Hundreds, hundreds. And sometimes the things with the smallest circulations, like even fanzines, uh, have preserved information that would have otherwise been lost because they were interviewing some of these comic creators before they passed away. And that turned out to be a real treasure trove.

SPEAKER_01 54:14

Talk about a different approach to a book. That's like you did books of poetry where you're basically, you know, having a cup of Earl Gray and thinking about life. And then you you you went on this extensive research assignment. You're visiting locations, you're pouring through archives. That how did you wrap your head around that? That's such a different mindset.

SPEAKER_00 54:39

Well, I really didn't know what I was getting into, but I will say this at least it's fun. You know, it's a subject that I liked. My youngest son, Ralph, is a photographer, so a very good photographer professionally. So I took him with me when we went to Cleveland, and he took pictures of like Jerry Siegel's childhood home. Or this is the we the current owners led us into the house, which was really moving, being in the room where Jerry created Superman. I'm just it was, I mean, I could feel an energy there. It was very uh moving. I was gonna put a picture in the book, and Ralph sent me one, and I look so mopey and sad. I thought, Ralph, can can you give me a one a photo where I don't look weird? And he said, No, Dad, you look weird in all of them. So that's not in the book. But uh, you know, getting uh so it became kind of a family project, and we got to see the the house and a lot of other things, and uh, you know, it's just a lot of fun. Uh hard work, but still fun.

SPEAKER_01 55:48

Super fun. I was sparking some of my books at the Pasadena Comic-Con, and it was only about a 10-minute drive from the Van Halen house where Eddie and Alex Van Halen grew up. So I was with my son too, and we're like, let's go, let's go over to um check out the house. It's public domain where the address is. So we drove over, we parked the car. I ran into another podcaster who specializes in Van Halen who happened to be there, and we talked it up and we were walking around where it all happened. I pick peered into the living room where they used to play together, and there's something about that visceral lived experience of connecting with your subject matter, yes, which is intense.

SPEAKER_00 56:36

Yeah. I I love going to writers' homes, even the ones that didn't create Superman, but I just feel like you know, this is in a small way giving back to the people who gave us so much and probably didn't uh benefit from it the way they should have.

SPEAKER_01 56:54

So which is usually the case, and of course, the the theme here. There it's almost like a time machine when you go back, because you know, the earth is moving, time is flowing. But if you sit at the desk of Ralph Waldo Emerson and you see the little wood grains in it, then you're connected in time and space to something that's almost mythical. And it makes them more human than anything else you could pretty much do, then kind of experience what they were experiencing in that very physical, visceral kind of way. Oh, it's cool. Totally right, totally right. It's it's neat. It's neat. So what's what's in the future for Bill Bernhard? You did Superman Wars, you've got all of these books bread crumbed behind you. This is such a this is such a leap for you, this book. What's cooking?

SPEAKER_00 57:52

The next one, I should have asked you to guess, but I won't put you on the spot. Next year it's gonna be the Batman Wars. Uh, and and let me just tell you, uh, as horrible as the Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster story is, the story behind Batman the craters is worse, in my opinion, and probably even less well known than the Superman story. So I'm anxious to get that story out into print, too. There are some people who have not gotten credit that they should. So that's what I'm gonna do with that one.

SPEAKER_01 58:29

I was kind of leading you on with some of the other controversies in comic books, and uh, I could tell you were you were holding a little back because I think you're you're already knee deep into that next step, right? You're ready to go.

SPEAKER_00 58:41

You are so right, yeah. I've just got back this last weekend from a research trip to Indiana for the Batman book, but I think it's gonna be an eye. I mean, Batman is hugely popular now, but does anybody know the story of where he came from? Very few, I think.

SPEAKER_01 59:00

So it's as elusive as the true identity of Bruce Wayne. I gotta say that my big takeaway from all of this is we as a writer and as a creator, and you you experience this directly too, all the time, our our day-to-day experience compared to our output, there's often a huge delta. And there's such a challenge of just being able to create. He described it like working in a submarine, right? It's this cauldron of sweat and pain and risk and heavy lifting. And then the waiter brings you your delectable thing, which gives so many people so much pleasure. And hearing you describe Jerry's story and relating it to my own experiences as a creator, and I'm sure you could relate too, is that that intense resistance between this creative energy courting the muse and all of her gifts coming down to us, and just the day-to-day grind and difficulties that we face as human beings, just being able to do this, I think is a central part of the magic. And I think your book hits that home. That just like bright lights cast long shadows, if you choose this life of a creator, it's gonna be difficult. There are no guarantees of success. But don't get discouraged by all the obstacles and punches in the face because that's the fuel of the creative engine itself.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:55

Yeah, very well said, totally agree.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:57

Yeah, guy, that's what I got the most out of uh out of this new project of yours. So I want to thank you sincerely for making time. Bill Bernhardt, ladies and gentlemen, we're gonna have links at the bottom for you to reach him, talk to him, contact him. Writer, writer con. That sounds like uh a great opportunity to actually connect with agents who aren't scam artists.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:19

Yeah, it's Labor Day weekend every fall in Oklahoma City. Great conference. Hope you can join us.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:26

And another big takeaway, writers, it's like butt in chair, hands on keyboard, great, go for it and do it. But your responsibility, if you want to get read, is to go out there and pitch it and give it and engage with the world directly. Exactly. And if you don't like networking, just look at it like you're making friends.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:48

You know, I I think writers do tend to be kind of introverted, but this is your tribe for Pete's sake. Everybody here feels the same way you do, so there's nothing to be embarrassed about.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:00

So don't tower in a corner or brood and and and be complaining and frustrated that no one reads you. Go out there and get read. Yeah, exactly. Thanks so much, Bill. It was a real pleasure, and I'd love to follow up with you six months or a year. And when Batman cranks out, let's uh let's unveil the uh the secrets behind that.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:23

Sounds great. It's been a blast. Thanks for having me on.